Lately I'm feeling frustrated and more creatively articulate than ever. 
It's like when I was first trying to get into art school. I'm actively trying to get much , much better at this. 
I know my accuracy is going up, as all of these pictures were taken on the same walk during the span of a few hours, yet at the same time I want to be much better. 

Directed & shot a music video this past Thursday.  
Shot on the Arri Alexa XT

50mm Nikon + 2x anamorphic ( Sankor 5e )
Surprised at how much can be retained with the low contrast flare. 

Building out a custom stack. For the longest time I've been piecing together a personal style. Testing digital and film, figuring out what works and what I like and then trying to bundle that attribute into a "function" . I often run my project through a group stack with pre and post blocks as powergrades that don't change much. 

Prep - main - post

1) Tone curve, MTF contrast , grain
2) CST conversions - Arri Log C to Davinci Wide Gamut + levels (squeeze and drop lol ) and subtractive saturation + highlight compression + split tone colour
3) Film Contrast DCTL + Mid to high remapping.

I've been looking for something where I can just shoot to taste and run everything through a stack with minimal switches. This way I can have a passable finish in minutes for entire projects. 
I shoot and colour my own stuff so it's a little different from working with a team where the footage has to be passed around. 
​
Shot this on the Arri Alexa XT Plus with Spherical ( Voigtlander 58mm f1.4 ) and Anamorphic ( Nikon 50mm 1.8 + Sankor 5e 2x anamorphic block through a Rapido FVD24a variable diopter )

Like still life painting , reps go toward hitting segments of a greater target.
It's weird but to improve quickly it's best to go slow. Setting specific intentional checkpoints. From there we start to become articulate. Accuracy goes up, expressiveness can be threaded in.

​From the start it was like knowing what I wanted to say but not knowing how to speak. Each day I do a bit more to close this gap. Building a playground piece by piece. Eventually getting to play professionally

The amount of work that it takes to make something look easy is absurd. On days when I'm unhappy this still brings me joy to say, it's working. Compressing highlights , lifting shadows, grain structure, frequency based detail, all into a recipe that works regardless of lighting condition. The work is done so we can hit the target every day , at first with less effort, and in time without thought, so the story at the core of all of this can be told. What a journey.​

It's finally starting to feel like summer. 

The First Hill.

For the past 20 years starting in my high school days the hill to climb was all about technique. Ideas were flowing through my head and I was dreaming in movies but I needed to learn how to grab things from my imagination and bring them into the real world. It took years, and a few odd routes, art, animation, cg and vfx, music , and tons and tons of reading. Slowly but surely , it worked.

The Second Hill.

I'm now at a point in my skill development where I'm capable of creating. There are no more limits to what I can do in terms of reaching my initial target. Through trial and error eventually one learns how to learn. But this hill isn’t about the technical knowhow of creating stuff. This hill is all about building a life with it.

I spent a lot of time mulling over strategy, trying to figure out how to make a life picture like this work. I first summed it up in a phrase.

“I want to live a great long and healthy life, with true financial freedom, while traveling the world slowly, making films, learning languages and telling haunting stories heal people, while surrounded by the people that I care about the most.

The following step is both harder and easier than anything I’ve ever done.

I must be brutally honest, every day , for as long as I live.

I must be brutally honest, with myself, in my art, and in my interactions with everyone. I have to shed away the excess, and communicate the things that are at times a little too vulnerable. I have to embody the things that I love the most, and the things that I find to be the coolest , ultimate version of what I dream my art and my life could be.

In this process, I’ll gradually be able to connect with the specific type of people that can benefit from what I create as a transfer of energy. So, this segment of the journey is about clarifying it all and delivering this to you, wherever you’re reading this.

This arc is a process of consolidation. The first half ( craftsmanship ) is required to reach a point of immersion. This is where the observer no longer sees the pieces of the work, but simply experiences emotion unencumbered. The second half ( clear honesty ) is required to keep this process in tact over the long run and to further refine the impact of this communication.


So let's see what comes of it. I look forward to sharing more with you along this journey.


Summed up:

The technical fades away to create immersion, and the fuel that keeps the fire burning is honesty. 

My friend bought a new home. 

Log : Progression this week is in the form of the low end of my images. I've been combining a few things together to figure out what type of "punch" my main style should have. I'm leaning into a bit of what I experienced shooting Kodak Vision 3 500T, and some of what I've learned from Walter Volpatto. I also used tools from the homie Kaur in DaVinci Resolve.

These images were captured using the Arri Alexa XT Plus, and the Voigtlander 28mm f2.8. 

Click here to edThe eldest and youngest members of my family.
Grandma's 88th. She used to be a photographer back in Trinidad. When she moved to Canada more than 50 years ago, someone went out of their way to burn all of her old albums. From then she stopped carrying a camera with her, but the practice was picked up by my father, and then by myself and my cousins. When we were talking the other day, she was grinning ear to ear, happy that everyone could be there, and that we kept taking photos.it.

Lately I've been shooting more film. Along with that comes processing some of the older rolls I've had in my cameras. 
Here's a bit of 35mm Kodak Vision 3 500T. Shot this on the Nikon F5 with Voigtlander glass. 

The frameworks that we live in , in large part are given to us. 
Later, a form of liberation comes at the moment when we understand that it's all custom. 
Remember that in large part you can build your day to day structure targeting the lifestyle first and reverse engineering the other aspects around that day to day flow. It may not always be easy , but life tends to bend over time to a well laid out and followed plan. If unplanned, the odds of attaining an objective fall to near zero. 
Aim true, and remember that success is the progressive realization of a worthy ideal. It's a habit and a commitment, not simply a checkpoint.

As this season of shoots starts to pick up , I'm spending a little more time running tests. 
Although I'm sure in my skill set, I always like to run through scenarios a few more times to keep creative.