Life at 20-70mm

There's nothing like 6 am sushi in Tokyo to get the ball rolling again on this blogging thing.

A few weeks before my flight to Japan, I was imbued with a newfound passion to be a travel vlogger. I wanted the prestige, drama, and excitement of showing people the world through a 16mm lens. My excitement clouded my good decision-making skills, and I handed over a few paychecks to some sketchy seller on eBay. After days of waiting, a terrifying "package lost request", and some shenanigans with the tracking number, it finally came. I was the naive new owner of the Sony a6600— a professional.

Forgoing the Youtube tutorials and reading the manual, I jumped right in. "It's not that much different from an iPhone", I said to myself. "Point, shoot, and be amazed".

Damn.

They were underexposed, very impulsive, and blurry—just like my dreams of being a vlogger. I was sad that I had just invested so much for nothing. What was the point? I just laid in bed for a day or two (not to be dramatic or anything; recovering from surgery) and cooked up a plan.

I started by reading articles to learn all the niche camera terms: f-stop, aperture, shutter priority mode, etc.

It had me asking some very fundamental questions like, "What is light and where does it come from?" A big ball in the sky? Fluorescent bulbs? Magic? Learning this stuff was essential for me to understand what to look for when I was shooting and how to improve. Next was videography but again just the basics: shutter speed, motion, and framing. It was the worst. I'll save you the pain and skip over the week I spent vlogging things like eating cereal just to get a handle on how the camera worked.

Now what can one do with all these videos and photos? Edit!!! I was preparing to shell out the big bucks for an Adobe subscription, convinced it was the "professional choice", but then I found him.

Davinci Resolve 18. The completely free professional video editing software that makes my footage look ~crispy~. It has color grading, audio mixing, and timeline editing all native to the software. I highly recommend it.

Anyway, I'm still learning but I'm looking forward to seeing what this becomes. That's all for now. I'm going to go get some more sushi and raid a 7-11 before my flight tomorrow.

Sayonara