ICELAND: TEN DAYS IN TEN SHOTS

No. Not gunshots. When I talk about "shots" I talk about something I've taken with my camera, not an Ak-47.

Get over yourself.

I've just finished uploading all my raw camera footage from the HDD I took to Iceland to the work computer. Once I unwrapped it from its compressed storage medium to full Pro Rez 422 I ended up with about 400 GB of video.

I did the math and that comes out as ... a fuck of a lot.

It will take a while to log all the footage and find a suitable program format etc. I will probably document that oh so fascinating process on my other blog, Idiot With a Camera

In the meantime I decided to make a little trailer, a tease if you will. Normally I would select a dynamic piece of music and cut to it, lots of fast cuts with some filters, titles etc. I still may do that but looking at this footage, shot in this incredible country, I found that it mostly speaks for itself. It did not really need "jazzed" up.

I realized I could best create a teaser of our Iceland trip just by presenting a few clips as they were captured, with the naturally occurring ambient audio. But how to package that? The solution seemed obvious: Our trip lasted 10 days, including our 6 day guided tour around the country. So what about picking one shot to represent each day of the trip: Ten days in ten shots

Simple yet difficult. Each day, especially during the tour, was jam packed with events and sights and sounds. We went a lot of places, we saw a lot of things ... in one day on the tour we could visit 3 or 4 locations. How do I pick just one locale? And from that, pick one shot.

The answer was to pick an event and/or place that had the greatest impact, that lingered in my mind: The beautiful church that is the focal point of the pretty capitol city of Reykjavik; a storm racked bit of coast line in Snaefelles; the bubbling and steam of the hottest spring in the country; the slick back of a minke whale breaking the surface; the thunder of the most proficient waterfall in Europe; an ice berg floating in a glacial bay; ice adorned mountains guarding a gigantic glacier; the explosion a huge geyser; gulls circling the City Pond back in Reykjavik; steam gilding bathers at the Blue Lagoon ...

I could easily re edit this piece, finding more and more compelling images. But the exercise was to just string together a string of impressions. For me, they are memories. I hope, for you, they are enticements to stay tuned ...