From Photography to Videography and Film making.

I am exhausted. Photography seems so plain to me. I believe this whole state is because instead of creating imagery, I have become like those seeking attention on social media, motivated by likes, comments, shares, etc

I started my journey at the age of 12. I say this repeatedly because this has a lot to do with the hows and whys of my photography. When I first picked it up, it was to create or recreate things I had seen in magazines. I wanted to be just like those folks. By my Freshman year, I had stopped because my SLR was stolen. Mom and Dad gifted me a Kodak Instamatic with flip flash, so I was capturing portraits and family gatherings.

I still enjoyed it, but it had taken a back seat to my other endeavors. We had recently moved to Sacramento, CA, and I was adjusting to a new environment and school. There weren't many brown kids at the all-boys school, Christian Brothers HS, but that didn't matter much. The other guys accepted me and never made me feel left out, save that I wasn't much of an athlete, so there went the pickup ball games.

During my senior year in High School and then in the Marine Corps and the Reserves and my first years of junior college at American River College, I finally picked up the camera again; this time, it was to capture my surroundings, but I also loved the photos I was doing of the beautiful women on campus. It also helped 'pad' me from having to actually 'talk' to people as I wasn't the extroverted type.

It was exciting, and I loved taking photos of the beauty around me. Everyone and everything was beautiful to me, and I wanted to capture it with my camera. At this time, I learned about the darkroom and developed and printed my own photos, first in black and white and then in color. It was a grand time, the mid-to-late 80s, through the 90s, and so forth.

Fast-forward to today, and it feels exhausting. I don't recall ever doing photography for anyone else but myself, my clients, and my friends. They loved my work, my clients loved the work I made for them, and my friends loved seeing their photos. 

These days, it's for likes, comments, and reposts, and perhaps I'm not tired of photography so much as I am exhausted at the 'need' for posting on social media and needing that validation. I never needed that before. I have worked for several different ad agencies and publications. I have tearsheets from the WSJ, the NYT, the Washington Post, and the SFO Chronicle, as well as a number of local magazines, etc. But I want more.

So, as a side step, and because my gear can do video and I have a small background in gripping and editing videos, I am now going into it, I am thinking of what to do for my first piece, and I think I want to do a documentary, I will challenge myself. I follow a documentary filmmaker named Mark Bone on YouTube. He has this one-day documentary challenge to try to shoot a documentary all in one day. I suppose edits can happen after that, but just the shooting part, just ONE DAY! - One Day, huh? Okay, Challenge Accepted!

Let me figure out something and get to that; I'll get some bts photos of it and share my adventures. I plan to find another aspect of creating that will revive my love of this craft!

A H Oftana

Guam-based freelance photographer |

I take pics of most things |

Freelancer NYT, WSJ, ThePost |

ASMP |

USMC Veteran!

http://www.oftana.com
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Cine lenses and other manual focus lenses

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Aria, the full take