Last weekend I took a trip up to San Francisco. I snapped off nearly two thousand shots of landscapes, abandoned forts, Golden Gate Park, and just about anything that caught my eye. I uploaded the photos to my netbook using Picassa's photo software and the pictures were displayed on the screen in a sort of choppy fast slide show as they imported. The montage of images seemed to tell the story of the weekend and inspired the idea to make this film. None of these shots were intended to be time lapse video footage, and no shots from the weekend were omitted. It's like the beat writers work of the '60s in the sense that there was only minimal editing to make a publishable work.

A lot of people ask me about my process. This video presents the starting point: take tons of pictures. The sort of flickering feel of the movie is the result of auto bracketing. Most pictures were shot in at least three exposures both for purposes of creating HDR images and for ensuring that I get the right exposure for the subject. This weekend, I certainly took many more pictures than usual, just about 40GB worth, but in general I operate under the philosophy that for every hundred shots, there has to be a couple good ones. In the age of film, this philosophy translates to one good shot for every roll of 36, but with film, I tend to take more care and invest more thought in setting up shots. Once you own your memory card, it is free to fill it up over and over again, so we might as well take as many pictures as needed.

I am going to wrap up with a bit about the music in the video. Though it is an original piece, saying I wrote the song is a bit of stretch. A couple months back, I laid down a simple guitar rhythm and improvised some lead guitar and backup cello over it. The improvised and unedited music was born of the same sort of spontaneous impulse as the images, so it seemed fitting they would go well together.

- Download a free mp3 of the song here
- View photos from the weekend here (more to come)