I’m a late-adopter of most technologies. Nearly 40 years old before my first camera; last among my friends to give in to email and cell phone. No different in the world of moving pictures. In education, I remember Clay Good’s dictum to his phone-wired highschoolers: stills, but no movies. In his experience, video viewing and making sucked kids into a subjective vortex. When instead, they backed into the ‘old-fashioned’ technology of still photos, a more observant mindset emerged.

That was at least a decade ago. Today (2018), the triumph of selfies has warped our teens’ relationship to stills. In the seesaw-&-wratchet of technology, anything we do too much of is dulling. The trick is to stay fresh—to keep searching for each tool’s noblest use—and to desist from pounding screws with hammers.

I was lured into video by drones—one technology I jumped into rather early. I just knew that watching forests and streams pass below from Raven-strafing level would be mesmerizing. Hard to imagine one could tire of that.

And then there’s motioncams. What a revelation—to learn what critters do when we’re not there!  For me, video is currently a spice. Not the main course, but a tasty complement to more and more of my documentary efforts. Some of the older vimeo-posts linked below are composed strictly of still images, assembled into narrated slideshows, but using pan and zoom for some of the features we associate with “moving pictures.”

Oh yeah, and speaking of the rapidity of technological change, it’s already pretty amusing—that ‘poster’ for my 2015 video below called New technologies for old naturalists. The drone in that photo already looks about as “new” as a Model-T Ford.

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