In both photography and videography, there's a learning pattern that everyone goes through.

Everyone starts out the same way. You go out on their first shoot, you’re very excited, you come back and look at what you’ve shot and realize how much you’ve missed and how badly you messed up.

So, you learn. You go out, determined to not make the same mistakes again. And you come back and look at what you’ve shot and realize that you’ve made entirely new mistakes this time.

You go out again, determined to learn from these mistakes, and this time you come back and discover still other mistakes that you have made, and also that some of the original mistakes have snuck back in when you weren’t looking.

This goes on for a while.

Eventually, things level off. You find that you’re able to come back from your shoots and you have everything you need. You can enter into your edits comfortably, knowing that you’re leaving your shoots with what you needed.

Then, you start to notice that these edits are getting exhausting. You have so much footage or so many photos that it’s incredibly time-consuming to edit everything. Why do you have forty-six exposures of the bride, all from the same angle and with the same expression? Why did you shoot six minutes of footage of this band playing when you know you’re only going to use an 8-second clip? Just scrolling through all of this is taking way too much of your life.

So, you get better by getting thriftier. You learn what you don’t need, and your edits become faster, and your life becomes easier.

And now, here is where I start to diverge from a lot of other photographers and videographers I run into. Because I just don’t run my shoots that way.

Okay, so I ended my first post about shooting on film with this photograph, indicating that I didn’t know what I was doing.

That’s not really fair, I was trying to shoot out the end of the roll, so I was bound to end up with at least one image like this.

I think. I’m not sure if this scenario is actually entirely avoidable or not. I’ll learn as I go.

Regardless, at this point I was just aiming and clicking in order to finish out this roll and change film in order to keep shooting. This one isn’t actually a mistake.

But my first roll had a ton of light leaks at the end of it. Take a look:

So, after some hunting around for the right camera for me, I got a Minolta SR-T 101.

I got the photos back today, let’s take a look!

When I first started as a video producer at First Methodist, I was paired with a junior video producer named Keith. Keith was the first employee I ever had, and fortunately for me Keith was both very good at his job and very easy to manage. The best possible way to start figuring out how to be a manager, I think, is to be almost entirely extraneous to the whole process. I would recommend it to anyone.

One of the habits I got into that first year was doing lighting setups with Keith as my subject, snapping a test frame with the cameras, then talking the look over with Keith before the subject arrived. Just for fun, I started saving the frames in a collection on my computer with the idea of making an Instagram post at some point.

After about a year, I got promoted to creative director and had less time to spend directing videos, so I never finished the project. But today I stumbled across the folder I was saving all of the photos in and decided to post some of them here for posterity.

It has been half a decade since I last blogged - since anyone last blogged, probably - and it’s time for this space to pivot to something else.

I’ve been working on updating this site, and while there are lots of videos and photos I’m excited to highlight, there’s also a fair amount of stuff that needs to be culled. Some of those projects I still really love, though! So I’ll be posting some of those here so that they don’t go away forever.

So, if you’re reading through these posts from newest to oldest, a) I hope there were a number of posts you’ve read already and I’ve followed through on my promise to update this page, and b) you are about to make quite a jump when you read the next post.