I have not put together a video since August 2007. Three months later I went on a cruise to Italy, Greece and Dubrovnik in Croatia. I took along my Sony HDV camcorder. Back then 1080i was the best one could shoot on consumer camcorders. I also took my Canon 20D for still pictures. I came back from the trip, downloaded my photos to Aperture, and put away from miniDV tapes. I didn't look at those tapes again until earlier this month when I started learning how to use iMovie 09.
There is a lot to be desired from both still and video images that I shot on that trip. There is a lot to be desired from the still images I shoot today! I should have the time to learn to improve my shooting with a still camera and my photos have improved a little. I flip-flop between learning the craft of shooting pictures and learning the software to process them. When I think of where I started, I feel I have made a measurable dent on what I want to do. When I think about where I want to be, the progress feels infinitesimal and I feel frustrated and discourage.
Anymore I buy the books I read from the clearance shelves at Half Price Books in Castleton. Just weeks apart, I found Bruce Feiler's Where God Was Born and Abraham. After finishing the first book, which is actually the third in the series on the Torah or Hebrew Bible he started writing with Walking the Bible, I started reading Abraham. Yesterday I decided I wanted to read the book that started it all, the 2001 Walking the Bible: A Journey by Land Through the Five Books of Moses. I found a copy for $5.98 on the General Religion shelves at Half Price.
Before starting to write about the Bible, Bruce had already written four books and articles for magazines like Gourmet. Walking the Bible shot him to fame. He followed with his second book on the Bible, Abraham, a year later and then was involved in making the PBS documentary based on his first book. Where God Was Born, A Journey by Land to the Roots of Religion, was published in 2005. The series is Feiler's winning formula. The books represent the kind of book I have always wanted to write, combining personal transformation, history, travelogue and religion. His style in all three books is consistent. I start reading a few lines with the intention of dissecting his style and I am sucked into the narrative, forgetting what I had wanted to do. His prose reads so effortlessly that it quickly vanishes. Thee reader is left with his thoughts. Reading the books is like having an internal conversation with myself.
Every trip I've taken, whether to New York City or Las Vegas or across the Atlantic to some fairy-tale country in Europe or across the Pacific to the always powerful memory-laden Philippines, I take a notebook with me for jotting down ideas. I come home and like my video tapes I put them away on the shelf. Months or years later I try to read what I wrote and its gibberish to me. Just now I looked at the half dozen travel and jotting notebooks I have. This is the first time I've read these since coming back from my trips. I started writing a list of what each notebook contains. That should make checking them in the future a little easier. What I should do is what Feiler did. He wrote as he traveled. In an interview included in the paperback edition of Walking the Bible, Feiler shared something of his writing process. "Seriously, as a writer, I spend a lot of time trying to think of words to describe the physical appearance of a place. This was particularly challenging while spending so much time in the desert."
Pleasure in discovery and companionship has been the principal feature of the trips I've taken so far. Traveling to write is a different animal. One can still have the pleasure of discovery and delights of new sensations but one must spend the time to write "seriously." I don't think I can glean much from reading my travel notes at this point. Impressions are fleeting. One can choose to enjoy them as they come and let them go as others take their place. A writer must hoard those impressions. These, along with what one finds in research, are the chief ingredients a writer puts together to produce a book.
I am not very optimistic about what I can do with these old Dubrovnik clips. It is enough that I am doing editing video again. iMovie 09 has this amazing feature of stabilizing clips that wobble every which way. In still photography I've only started using a tripod with my D5 Canon just in the last few months. I didn't use a tripod with the camcorder. Without iMovie's stabilization feature I doubt I could find 1% of these clips usable at all.
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