A full listing in reverse chronological order (latest first) of all videos showcased on this site:
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Drive-by: Yucca Forest
Go to video page…: Drive-by: Yucca ForestDrive-by: Yucca Forest; video by Hamish Reid, soundtrack by Roxann Spikula. 2016: deep in my fave Joshua tree forest (a forest I’ve been visiting for a couple of decades now), somewhere in Death Valley National Park.
One of the few desert videos here that’s simply a celebration of the desert itself, in this case of a Joshua Tree (Yucca) forest in Death Valley National Park, a forest that’s a bit off the beaten track and that I try to visit every year. The video is made by the soundtrack, adapted from a piece by local musician (and friend) Roxann Spikula, who also drove my Subaru along the desert tracks here while I sat on top of it holding my iPhone taking the raw video footage with a little Ikan stabilizer (yes, it’s an iPhone video, and no, it wasn’t done with a drone).
Austere musical Greenland meets warm spiky desert visuals.
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Sleep (The Alabama Hills)
Go to video page…: Sleep (The Alabama Hills)Sleep (The Alabama Hills): a video by Hamish Reid. This 2016 video is what happens when you stroll around the Alabama Hills (near Lone Pine, California) with an iPhone shortly after having watched Picnic At Hanging Rock… somehow a nice friendly part of the world that I know so well is actually made to look a little sinister. Oh well.
It started out as a test of my then-new little Ikan stabiliser for my iPhone; it was the first time I’d used the combination of iPhone and stabiliser, and the footage wasn’t really intended to be used for anything much, but here it is. The Ikan works a charm, if a little flakily at times, and the iPhone’s video is usually pretty reasonable, or at least acceptable (it’s a lot easier than using either my D800 or FS700 for video).
What transformed this into a real video was using dark ambient noise band Relay For Death’s “Sleep” as the audio bed (with their permission, of course) — it put shape and shade to the previously-shapeless mass, and it all coalesced (congealed?) into what you see (or don’t see) here. That’s often the case with my videos — it’s the soundtrack that’s primary, that determines so much else about the pacing, the cutting, and the atmosphere. It wasn’t meant to be quite so claustrophobic and sinister, but I couldn’t help myself really, and, hell, it was just a test. A test that’s lived on well past its use-by date, but never mind — I still enjoy watching it, and people seem somewhat amused by the ending if they’re paying attention.
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Drive-By: Port
Go to video page…: Drive-By: PortDrive-By: Port, video by Hamish Reid, soundtrack by Stephen M. Duffy. The Port of Oakland, California, 2010-2012, as seen from a (very) slow-moving car with a DSLR hanging off the side windows…
I used to haunt the Port of Oakland. The container cranes and trains and trucks and the containers themselves stacked up everywhere just cried out to be videoed, so — as with Drive-By: Oilfield — I did the Drive-By Thing and drove very slowly through the Port whenever I could squeeze between the trucks. I got enough (shaky 720p) footage part-time over a year or so to be able to combine it with a nicely compelling soundtrack from Oakland musician Stephen M. Duffy and this is the result. As with the oilfield videos, I’d love to redo this with better gear, but Port security is much better nowadays and it just isn’t going to happen…
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Bridge
Go to video page…: BridgeBridge, video by Hamish Reid, soundtrack by Stephen M Duffy. March 2012: Driving the old east side of the San Francisco Bay Bridge before it was demolished.
Yes, it should be titled “Drive-By: Bridge”, but oh well. Back when the old Oakland side of the Bay Bridge was about to be replaced, I wanted to capture the hypnotic effect of driving through the old 1930’s girder-based section before it disappeared, so early one Sunday morning I attached a GoPro to my windshield, and drove steadily in the center lane across the entire bridge with the camera running. The San Francisco side looked kinda cool too, so I left it in, and used a soundtrack Oakland’s Stephen M. Duffy gave me, and this is the result…
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Drive-By: Oilfield
Go to video page…: Drive-By: OilfieldDrive-By: Oilfield, video by Hamish Reid, soundtrack by Stephen M Duffy. California, September / October 2011: Round Mountain Road, China Grade Loop, State Route 33, 7th Standard Road, Lost Hills Road.
An oilfield video done in the greater Bakersfield region, especially around State Highway 33 (probably my favourite California highway — I drive it a lot instead of taking Interstate 5 through The Valley). A couple of years after doing my Pumpjack video, I wanted to show people how surreal and weird the sprawling oilfields off either side of Highway 33 and nearby places down towards McKittrick and Taft are. So I did my Drive-By thing and hung a cheap Nikon DSLR (720p!) off the side window of my Subaru, and drove very slowly along the oilfield highways and roads when there was a suitable break in the traffic (which might take ten minutes to happen). No, I didn’t slow any part of this video down — it’s all been done at 30fps on that cheap DSLR’s video (and it really shows). As with Pumpjack, I’d love to redo this with modern 4K (or better) gear, better stabilization and exposure control, and knowing what I do about video work now (I knew nothing about how to do this sort of thing back then), but security is tighter nowadays, and the traffic seems a lot heavier. Plus I’m lazy. Maybe one day…
Soundtrack by Oakland’s Stephen M. Duffy.
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Drive-By: Desert
Go to video page…: Drive-By: DesertDrive-By: Desert, a video by Hamish Reid. May 2011: A week in the Mojave Desert: Barstow, Bishop, Daggett, Trona, Bristol Lake, Ludlow, Tehachapi, Amboy, Keeler… the usual suspects.
My first real attempt to make a video about human settlement and the Mojave, and also to capture some of the feeling of driving through the desert — the desert as it really is (and as I’ve known it in passing for decades now), not the pristine desert of the imagination or tourist brochures.
I wanted to do this video for years — all the sometimes bizarre and unsettling forms of human settlement in the Californian deserts (a topic I’ve touched on obliquely using still photos elsewhere) as seen from a car driving (very slowly) past it all. All those places I’ve been familiar with for years — Barstow, Baker, Ludlow, Dagget, Trona, Mojave, etc. — I wanted to show their strangeness, their steely toughness, their vulnerability, their shiny decrepitude. You know, Pretentious (or, perhaps, Portentous) Art School Motives variant number 7a (there’s a lot of this around). Except I’m no artist, and never went to art school (I’m an engineer by training and profession).
I had the overall architecture of the video in my mind for a long time, and by about 2010 the technology to do it became affordable for people like me. And so I went out and did it, over a long trip into the desert, using a variety of DSLR and other video cameras hanging off my Subaru using jerry-built mounts that only just kept the cameras from smashing to the ground on the rougher roads (it’s essentially an earlier version of the setup I used for Drive-By: Oilfield). I kinda like the end result — and it’s pretty close to what I’d envisioned all those years ago — but it’s really showing its age.
It’s backed by Mahler’s Das Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde (from his Das Lied Von Der Erde); I get criticized a lot for that soundtrack, but that soundtrack was in my mind from the start of the project: what better accompaniment to desert decrepitude and the American West’s endless struggle with entropy than a deliriously-overripe piece of Western Art Music? (Song Of The Earth is actually one of my all-time fave vocal music pieces, but never mind, it’s also over-the-top in ways that just cry out for a little snark — “Dark is life, dark is death!”, indeed). It also happened to be pretty much exactly the right length for the video, and had the right dynamics in the right places. It turned out to be easy to edit to as-is, which is unusual. And it’s not too encumbered with YT-based copyright issues, so there it is.
I’m really tempted to do an updated scenic 5K version in the next year or two…
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Pacific Champ
Go to video page…: Pacific ChampPacific Champ, video by Hamish Reid, soundtrack by Handsome Poets (Duffy / Ward, Oakland CA). MV Pacific Champ departs The Port of Oakland’s Schnitzer Steel to a soundtrack by Oakland’s Handsome Poets (© Duffy / Ward, by permission).