An Afternoon at the Arboretum
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The Jacksonville Arboretum is a 120 acre property north of the Regency Mall. It offers a few hours of hikes through some nature trails that seemed inviting last Sunday. I also thought it would be a good subject of my next iPhone-video project, so I brought the tripod along. I have an attachment that can mount my iPhone to the mounting screw of the tripod. The little mounting-plate that carries the mounting screw was sitting in my camera bag on my dresser back home while I set up to do my first panning shot.
The result was a crude set-up of mounting the iPhone on the Glif to the GorillaPod and GorillaPod to the tripod. This is the reason for uneven panning in the video — the best edits from a huge number of failed panning attempts — the missing mounting-plate being the cause of my frustration and anger at the situation and everything around me. Only when I went through the footage in the comfort of my home did I hear me cursing in the background of some of these shots. Cursing at Laya for not being steady, cursing at the tripod etc, all of which have been edited away and replaced by a beautiful song by Sigur Ros.
Constraints are a wonderful teacher of creativity. Only towards the end of the Ravine Trail did I start to embrace the constraint of the missing mounting-plate. Setting up a shot took longer than necessary but it resulted in the panning shot of the meandering stream that emerges from the tiny spring a few hundred yards away. After that shot, I packed away the tripod and the iPhone and focused on Laya, the trail, and the walk. A better, more in-depth movie about the Arboretum will have to wait for another day.
If nature teaches us one lesson, it is that of patience.