Extreme lack of posts in the month of September up in here, no? Crazy. September was actually a pretty crazy month. In fact, I wrote this blog entry at the end of September and I’m just now posting it.  I’ve had a lot going on in terms of travel (for me, anyway). Since I had two trips smashed against each other coming up I had to spend a lot of time preparing my home to be gone for almost two weeks and organizing my things on top of other work I’ve been doing. In the middle of September I went on a work trip to northwest Arkansas for three days. Then I got home and left the next morning for Gettysburg, PA, a family vacation, for a week. I just got back last Saturday evening and my cats are still freaking out about my absence.

The Arkansas trip was an attempt to capture updated b-roll for our two main clients. We got a lot of footage and I used things I had learned on my traveling trip to Miami to make me better on this trip, which was good. Unfortunately the footage I needed most got mostly rained out. I didn’t get much and the stuff I did get looks so rainy and blah. It’ll work for some things but it’s not exactly pretty. It is however in focus, which I was worried about with the rushing around and raining and such. So ha. If you didn’t see my tweets, basically what we were doing is following a semi on a scenic highway, getting ahead of them far enough to jump out of the car and quickly set up a shot, and shoot them driving by in different ways. I wish I had brought a bag to wrap around the camera in the rain but it probably wouldn’t have helped very much with how fast we were needing to set up shots. It got so rainy by the end of shooting unfortunately that it became unusable. My hair did not do well in all this and as a bonus we had to go straight back to the airport for our flight so I couldn’t change out of rainy clothes or get my brush out for my hair. Note to self – put a small travel brush in the camera bag.

Air travel with equipment sucks so much, by the way. Because we were basically traveling regional airlines, we were on tiny planes with tiny overhead bins. My camera bag is well under the carry on maximums and I always take it on the plane. On regular planes it fits with lots of room to spare. On these little jets I had to jam it in. As a bonus, our flight was delayed on the way back, making our connection too short to complete. As a result, we rebooked on a later flight and ended up being the last ones on the plane. No overhead bin space left and I had to check the camera at the gate. Between baggage handlers and rain, I wonder if the thing still works. We don’t do a lot of air travel or otherwise I would have a more robust manner of transporting these things. Oh, and somehow our pilot made up the 30 minute delay in the air and got us to the connection on time to make it, but our baggage was on the later flight anyway. And then Delta didn’t even know which flight we went on. It’s amazing we made it back at all.

Anyway, I got home at midnight, spent a couple of hours with last minute packing, slept an hour, then left for the vacation. I took some photos and a couple of videos of some interest I’ll post later.

Yea, that all happened in September and I just got back from another trip to the south, this time driving to Arkansas and back. It was much of the same stuff as before so I won’t rehash. I can confirm that I definitely am ready to NOT drive across the country for several months please.