Have some fun and try a new medium
As an avid traveler, I have a list of the places I want, need, have to go to, taped next to my computer. While this list is a source of inspiration, it also prevents me from visiting the same place twice, no matter how much I loved it. There is just not enough vacation time or money, sadly, to visit the places I know I love AND visit the new destinations.
Of course there are a couple of exceptions, one notable is Sanibel Island located off of the coast of Florida. In the past four years, I have visited three times, courtesy of my family’s timeshare. The terrific thing about visiting the same place multiple times is that it takes the pressure off of doing and seeing everything in one trip. I know that if I don’t get to kayak, or eat dinner at the Mucky Duck, or squeeze in an afternoon at the J.N. "Ding" Darling National Wildlife Refuge, that I can always make time for those activities next year.
Likewise, this gives me some breathing room creativity-wise. I have photographed a lot of the wildlife and scenery on the island and while each year offers up new photographic opportunities, this year I wanted to try the 1 second everyday video app instead of relying solely on photos to remember my trip. (If you are not familiar with 1 second everyday video app, you can read more about it here) Don’t get me wrong, I still took plenty of photos, but I wanted to stretch a little bit and try something new.
I’m glad I did, because I thought it would be easy, a notion quickly disproved. I planned some shots out ahead of time, but I quickly realized they wouldn’t work. For example, it’s hard to read phrases in one second, so some of the signs I videoed wouldn’t work at all. On day one, after reviewing the videos I shot, I thought most of them were boring or sloppy and/or unusable.
But I wasn’t discouraged, on the contrary, I felt motivated to make something better. So I started paying more attention to the motion of my subject and/or the motion of my camera, if it was too fast or too slow, they wouldn’t work as a one second video. I also decided to try and simplify my videos so that they were easy to visually comprehend in a second: a spinning fan under the cabana, a beer can being cracked open on the porch, a ticking watch in the airport.
I also tried different angles for more interesting perspectives, and God help me, I even considered buying a selfie stick so that I could create a smoother approach/zoom on subjects and create more interesting angles.
And lastly, I spent a ridiculous amount of time arranging the sequence of the shots in my timeline. You can tell different stories or create different moods by the very order of the videos themselves, which would be a fun experiment to try some time: rearranging the same videos in a different order or pattern to see if it changes the mood of the video. Maybe in my next blog.
In short, I had a lot of fun with the project. It’s not perfect, but it was a good jumping-off point for me. There will be more vacations that will serve as excellent case studies for me as I continue to experiment and grow my video skills and of course there will always be Sanibel next year.
Note: I started off using I second video, but I was really irritated by the fact that I couldn’t remove the timestamp from my videos in the app. I ended up downloading Final Cut Pro (You can download a trial version here) and placing my clips in the timeline. I also made them a little longer by a second or two in some cases because, hey, it’s my video and I’ll make them longer if I want to.
A Winter Visit to the Indian Echo Caverns
There’s nothing like a friend visiting from out of town to remind you of what’s in your own backyard.
Entrance to Indian Echo Caverns
There’s nothing like a friend visiting from out of town to remind you of what’s in your own backyard.
Indian Echo Caverns is in Hummelstown, PA which is about 30 minutes from my home, and in the 10 years I have lived in Lancaster, I had yet to visit. Having visited Penn’s Cave as a kid and watched The Descent, I thought I filled my quota om caves, but when my friend suggested it, I thought, why not?
So we headed out on Saturday morning, sunny and still snow-covered, and booked the first tour of the day at 10:30am. Our tour group was only four people not including the guide, which seemed like the perfect size to me. In the spring and summer seasons, their tours can swell to include up to 28 people.
We hung out in their large gift shop waiting for the tour to start, browsing racks of dream-catcher earrings, gemstones, and pocket knives personalized with names. The tour begins about 71 steps above the entrance to cavern with warnings and pleas not touch the rock formations because the oil in our fingers prevents new formations from growing.
We climb down the stairs covered in salt and the cold morning air is still; the Swatara creek and snow glittering in the bright sunlight. We are told that the cave stays at a constant 52 degrees, year round. While 52 degrees would undoubtedly send me running back to my car in search of a sweatshirt in the summer, it feels positively balmy in the winter.
Standing in the “entrance room”, our tour guide begins his spiel which is informative and lively (can you say stalagmite), but peppered with jokes and observations that were so family-friendly and corny that I couldn’t help but picture Truman (played by Jim Carrey) telling the same jokes in The Truman Show, if Truman was giving tours of caves, of course.
For example, “You’ll have to use your imagination for this one, If you look at the rock formation above you, it looks like the New York City skyline– upside down! [Long pause] I said you had to use your imagination!”
"Good afternoon, good evening, and good night!", my friend.
The cave is dark (obviously) but outfitted with electric lights that the guide turns on and off in different parts of the caverns during the tour, the effect being that the guide has the chance to give you a “Wow” moment. My “Wow” moment on the tour was standing in the Indian Ballroom in the dark when the guide hit the lights and I was suddenly staring up forty feet above me at a wall of stalactite, stalagmite and column formations. The beauty and the grandeur of the formations is stunning as was the realization that it is naturally hidden from the world, in the complete dark most of the time.
The tour continues to different “rooms” like the Blue Room and the Wedding Chapel– each impressive and visually complex in their own right. They are linked by a series of narrow, wet passages which met my personal cave authenticity requirements. If it’s not a little dirty, a little wet, and a little claustrophobic then you probably shouldn’t call it a cave. The rocks that the most tourists have banged their heads off are helpfully indicated by red lights or pointed out by the guides with such names such as “Headache Rock”.
After the tour was complete, we emerged from the cave into the bright winter morning, blinking and squinting as our eyes adjusted and then started our climb back up the parking lot. I mentally checked off Indian Echo Caverns from my long list of places to see, subcategory: In my backyard.
