From southern Mexico to rural California, Matt Black documents the social issues of modern farming and the effects of one of the most severe droughts in recorded history.
Matt Black began photographing the small towns and expansive farmlands of California’s Central Valley for nearly 20 years. A native of that vast agricultural area that runs nearly the entire length of the state, Matt says he began to notice a shift in the people working the fields around his home town.
Landscape time-lapse video requires movement to be interesting. That’s usually accomplished by motion control and (more importantly) dramatic moving light in the form of clouds and shadows. In the Bay Area that means winter is our window to shoot time-lapse of any weather besides fog. (As I demonstrated in my Day in the Life of a Fire Lookout video<, fog can be a great subject but when you’re on top of a mountain and pointing the camera upwards it doesn’t help much.)
I began shooting for the West Peak project in late December and by early January I had learned a lot about what I need to do to get the shots I want. The West Peak area I’m working in is between 2450 and 2530 feet in elevation and when the cloud ceiling is just around that height the scene becomes very dramatic. The sight of the clouds rolling across the landscape and breaking to reveal the Marin headlands provides strong visual cues that we are on the top of a mountain.
Photographer and filmmaker Gary Yost writes about his project to document the history of the lost West Peak of Mt. Tamalpais.
Over the past two months I’ve been busy conducting initial tests of new motion-control equipment I’ve acquired for creating the time-lapse portion of the project. One of my frustrations with the two-foot slider I used in the Fire Lookout piece is that it wasn’t long enough to provide enough visual parallax cues to make larger scenes look three-dimensional. These parallax cues are essential to providing an immersive sense of the scene because when the camera is moving, closer objects will move across your visual field much more quickly than objects farther away. When shooting basic time-lapse sequences you can easily lock the camera down on a tripod and shoot a frame every few seconds. That’s easy to do, but to get parallax effects you need to mount the camera on a motorized slider that will move it a fraction of an inch after every shot. This technique was invented by Ron Fricke in the late 1970s for the groundbreaking film Koyannisqatsi, and then refined for his later masterpieces, Chronos, Baraka, and 2012’s Samsara.
This will be Jeff Zaruba’s second year teaching a class at The Flow. He likes to get into the “why” behind his students interest in photography, and help them understand their vision and curiosity. He finds working with the students incredibly rewarding as he helps them gain confidence and reach the next level of their artistic potential.
Photographer and filmmaker Gary Yost writes about his project to document the history of the lost West Peak of Mt. Tamalpais.
I am a Mill Valley-based photographer and filmmaker who likes to tell stories, big and small. Over the years I’ve been fortunate to be a part of some very interesting local community activities.
One of my 2012 projects was to document what a day in the life of a fire lookout on the East Peak of Mt. Tamalpais is like. I created it primarily as a recruitment piece for the Marin County Fire Department, but it saw much wider distribution as a testimony to the beauty of our mountain. There are a number of reasons for its popularity but I think the two biggest are that it shows an aspect of the mountain that nobody has seen before and it uses time-lapse techniques to illustrate how time passes in a way that we can’t see with our naked eyes.
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