Featured Videos

Some of my favourite videos; this selection will change (slowly) over time.

  • Unnatural Landscapes 3: Oilfield

    Unnatural Landscapes 3: Oilfield — a video by Hamish Reid.

    Number three in the Unnatural Landscapes series, and probably my favourite: an unusually fixed (but hypnotic) view of the Kern River oilfields from the bluffs overlooking the Kern River in Bakersfield from footage taken in 2024. I’ve struggled to get a video version of this sight (and site) for decades (I have some good still photography shots of it, though); I think I finally got it close to what I want with this one. A large part of why I think the clip works is the soundtrack by my friend Garry Manley (again!) in Sydney, which seems to echo in sound the shimmering visuals — this video wouldn’t work nearly as well without that soundtrack.

    Go to video page…: Unnatural Landscapes 3: Oilfield

  • Road Dream (Machine Mood 7)

    Road Dream (Machine Mood 7) — a video by Hamish Reid.

    An experiment in layered abstraction, compositing modes, and textures… and keeping things moving along several axes at once. Without using AI. A continuation of my Easy Viewing series, but in this case with a perfect soundtrack by Garry Manley (again); but it’s also really a Machine Mood as well. Either way, it grew out of the Unnatural Landscapes effort…

    Go to video page…: Road Dream (Machine Mood 7)

  • Train

    Train: a video by Hamish Reid.

    A Fly-By I made recently from a raw clip I actually took a few years ago (2020) in the Mojave desert. The soundtrack’s an excerpt from György Ligeti’s Lux Aeterna, performed by Cappella Amsterdam & Daniel Reuss (2008). The soundtrack’s supposed to give the whole thing an ethereal tinge as a counter to the more angular and rough surfaces, colours, and geometries of the train and its surroundings, but I could have gone the other way instead, and tried a much more Industrial track (from the usual suspects) before I settled on Lux Aeterna (one of my fave Ligeti pieces).

    Go to video page…: Train

  • Machine Mood 6: Siding

    Machine Mood 6: Siding; video by Hamish Reid, sounds by Relay For Death taken from “Mutual Consuming”, used by permission.

    Both a Fly-By and a Machine Mood… with this one I wanted a wall of sound effect, and I think I got it. I reused some older RFD stuff and added the voice of a local Latino street preacher way down in the mix, and, along with the short clip of a lonely desert railroad siding I’ve wanted to do exactly this to for maybe five years, here it is.

    There’s a manipulated Ultra-High-Glare version as well that more effectively conveys the stinging washed-out desert light that’s the reality in places like this, but it loses the detailed colors I like so much in the original. Maybe I’ll put it up some day as an alternative version (I don’t know).

    Go to video page…: Machine Mood 6: Siding

  • Water Park (Post-Apocalyptic Version)

    Water Park, a video by Hamish Reid; soundtrack by Relay For Death.

    The derelict Rock-A-Hoola water park in the middle of the Mojave Desert, east of Barstow, California, 2020-2023, with a post-apocalyptic Industrial soundtrack by Relay For Death.

    This place has always fascinated me over the decades — it used to be an actual water park, big water slides and pools and all, right there next to Interstate 15 in the middle of the boiling hot, stone dry Mojave Desert, a little east of Barstow, California. I remember it being full of people… sometimes. Other times it was closed. It had a troubled history, and has been derelict continuously now for many years. Naturally it’s been heavily graffitied and there’s always someone strolling furtively around in the ruins taking photos (I’ve even seen self-consciously Punk fashion shoots there) or doing donuts on the broken concrete; it’s a real ruins porn magnet for more serious photographers. This is my contribution to the genre, done over a couple of years and a few of my own furtive run-and-gun sessions…

    Go to video page…: Water Park (Post-Apocalyptic Version)

  • Over Owens Lake

    Over Owens Lake, a video by Hamish Reid; soundtrack by Relay For Death.

    Owens Lake, California, 2024.

    At the beginning of the twentieth century, Owens Lake in California’s Owens Valley was a large 100 square mile blue-water saline desert lake fed by mountain streams and rivers. Then Los Angeles’s thirst took over, and as part of the California Water Wars, by the 1930’s the Owens Valley had been bled dry to help feed Los Angeles’s relentless expansion (LA is about 175 miles to the south).

    As a result, Owens Lake was turned into a toxic dust bowl, with alkali dust storms blowing up from the dry lake bed. By 2013 it was the largest single source of dust pollution in the US. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) has lately been forced by legal action to try to mitigate the worst effects of its hundred years of deliberate neglect. The LADWP’s attempts don’t appear to have a lot of effect, and have resulted in bizarre landscapes in and around the lake.

    I first saw what was left of Owens Lake in the late 1980’s, I think, when it was much worse than it is now — the LADWP mitigation efforts over the last few years have had some impact on air and ground quality, I guess — but even still, the current state of Owens Lake generally has to be seen to be believed. There’s really no lake left, just various expanses of flat dusty poisonous wasteland, with, to the LADWP’s tiny credit, pockets of green here and there where birds seem to be thriving in the (tiny) wetlands again (the restored bits are maybe 1% of the original lake’s area, I believe). I’ve long felt a stupidly burning desire to show the world (or Californians, at least) what the lake really looks like, to show a view that’s generally hidden from the public (you’re only allowed on a tiny, very closely-curated bit of the old lake nowadays; the rest if off-limits by order of the LADWP). So here’s my attempt to give you some idea what’s behind the wire fences and “Trespassing Prohibited” signs.

    This video was taken from above and shows the bizarre landscape that’s the result of the LADWP’s mitigation efforts — a bunch of things like sprinklers or ditches or weird little islands in shallow ponds of strangely-colored water, or matting, or small flooded areas. Everything you see in this video should be under water — a lot of (mostly blue) water.

    Soundtrack © Relay For Death; used by permission (despite YouTube’s stupid content ID flagging this as a copyright hit…).

    Go to video page…: Over Owens Lake

  • Lone Star

    Lone Star, a video by Hamish Reid;
    soundtrack: Blood Count (Billy Strayhorn), performed by Duke Ellington.

    The old Lone Star concrete plant, West Oakland, California, from above in 2023.

    A video shot in 2023 above and around the old (but still active) Lone Star concrete plant in West Oakland. Like thousands of other people, I’ve driven past this strange-looking and seemingly on-the-verge-of-decrepit building regularly over the decades, and always wanted to capture how it both fits into and stands out from its industrial surroundings. I used the beautiful Billy Strayhorn composition “Blood Count” (as performed by Duke Ellington) for the soundtrack — I’ve had that tune rattling around in my mind for a long time waiting for something like this where I (obviously) want to make some sort of contrast with the familiar beaten-up old facade being swooped slowly around.

    Go to video page…: Lone Star

  • Promised Land

    Promised Land, a video by Hamish Reid; soundtrack by Relay For Death.

    California, 2020.

    Promised Land probably comes closest to summarizing a lot of what I ambivalently feel about humans and the Californian deserts, and it does it to a gorgeous soundtrack by local Bay Area industrial ambient noise band (and personal friends) Relay For Death. It’s also my longest video, and was shot in a bunch of locations stretching from east of Amboy, CA, in the Mojave Desert, through the Trona area, to the northern bits of California’s Owens Valley during the Covid era. I spent a lot of time thinking very broadly about where I was going to shoot before I went out and just did it over a week or so of shooting, but (of course) I mostly ended up making it up as I went along, using all the bits of the Mojave and the Owens Valley, etc., I’ve grown so familiar with over the last several decades. I didn’t mean to make it this long when I started it, but there was a lot of footage that sort of flowed naturally together, and the soundtrack — Relay For Death’s “Intone The Morph Orb” — turned out to make the length just right.

    Soundtrack: Relay For Death, “Intone The Morph Orb”, © Relay For Death, 2019.

    Go to video page…: Promised Land

  • Drive-By: Desert

    Drive-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. Much of it was done using the same really primitive 720p 30fps DSLR hanging off one of my Subaru’s side windows and driving very slowly that I used for Drive-By: Oilfield. 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 I always knew from long before I shot the video itself that I’d be using it — what could be more appropriate for backing the visuals of the dry wind-blown mixture of junk and ruins and natural beauty than a florid stretch of Western Art Music? And besides, it’s exactly the length I wanted.

    I’m really tempted to do an updated scenic 5K version in the next year or two…

    Go to video page…: Drive-By: Desert

  • Pumpjack

    Pumpjack, a video by Hamish Reid.

    Pumpjacks! (Or pump jacks, depending…). Round Mountain Road, Tupman Road, Highway 33, 7th Standard Road. California, October / November 2009.

    One of my all-time favourite videos. The original Machine Age video, and still by far the most popular of my videos (more than 350,000 views on YouTube). Done with a cheap old 1440i Sony DV prosumer tape unit (and a bit of trespassing — run-and-gun’s difficult when you’re using a huge heavy tripod and you’re parked on the non-existent shoulders of roads that have heavy trucks thundering down them) back in the Paleolithic era in the greater Bakersfield (California) area, it’s definitely one of my fave videos… and it’s definitely also showing its age (2009!). People sometimes complain that the soundtrack I cobbled together isn’t synced or that it’s monotonous, but hey, that’s kind of the point, right?

    I’d love to redo both this and Drive-By: Oilfield again with better gear now, but they’re much more savvy about oilfield security nowadays, and I’d never be allowed.

    Go to video page…: Pumpjack