Welcome to the first post of the first blog of my life. And being a photographer, this is naturally going to be all about… video.
My grandfather’s Super-8 camera and projector
I’ve been a movie maker all my life. From stop motion clips when I was a kid, to scripted team productions filmed with Super-8 cameras when I was a teenager, TV production classes in High School with live local broadcasts, and to road trip documentaries during my travels as an adult. It’s been on and off, but always there, driven in part by a great interest in Hollywood productions and especially how they are made.
I got my drone pilot license in 2018 with the intention to produce aerial photography for my clients. But one evening I was having beers with a screenwriter friend who has been behind big-hit Spanish TV series like “Compañeros”, “Los Serrano”, and “Amar es para Siempre”, just to mention a few. He said “Stefan, the high-end photography you produce, you know that stuff now. Go do video!”
The comfort zone. I pride myself for always incorporating new skills and techniques in my craft, but here I was being told that perhaps I was coasting on the top-end of a learning curve. I thought of what General Electric’s CEO Jack Welch once famously told his division managers when GE was a comfortably dominating player in almost all their fields: “I want you to redefine your markets in such a way that your market share goes under ten percent. And then I want you to work yourselves back up to number one.”
You know when planets align, because the very next day, one of my clients asked me to produce an aerial video of a property they manage in La Zagaleta. In your own career, I am sure you’ve had those moments of trepidation when you are not sure what you are getting yourself into. But here was my new learning curve being presented to me on a platter.
I have since been getting up to speed with things I never worried about before, like codecs, frame rates, and log-files, and I have made my video editing software into a second home (when I’m not living in Photoshop). New equipment has been acquired and tested out, I have gone through online tutorials and hooked up with an international network of peers to bounce ideas off and to get valuable constructive critique from. Education, practice and honest peers make for a strong evolutionary cocktail!