Failing in New York.

Last Sunday my friends and I spent our Saturday night in with hopes of progressing individual interests and skills in New York the following day.  We woke up at 6am that Sunday, went to breakfast and got on the road to LES Skatepark in lower east side Manhattan.  I spend most day trips like this taking a ridiculous amount of photos but this time I decided to focus on shooting Video.  I am a complete beginner when it comes to video which is a bit in contrast to my photography habits.  I would say I am an intermediate when it comes to photography but when it comes to video I am totally a beginner and that scares me. A couple weeks ago I was afraid to go back to being a beginner at something.  I felt it would make my image as a photographer look bad.  Despite my fears I took the risk and bought Adobe Premiere a video editing software essential in processing my videos.  This introduced another learning curve but after learning a few features it became an exciting process.  I shot about 90% video in New York that Sunday and a bout 10% photos.  I tried several times to make a finished product look good for a video, but I ended up with 4 videos that were totally lacking essential pieces to the equation.  The shots were mainly way too shaky, way to close to the subject, and several other things.  The video I tried to produce was a failure, but not a total failure.  I learned that next time I need to shoot at a wider focal length, and I need to use something to stabilize my camera for video.  

     What I took from this.  Failure is good, without failure you cannot learn, and with out learning you cannot succeed.  If you can identify great work you most likely have good taste you just don't have the skills yet to achieve that great finished product yet.  My advice to anyone struggling with learning anything, "Create as much shit work as possible and keep learning because,  it will lead to better work and then eventually great work."  Like Malcolm Gladwell says "10,000 Hours".  

Since the video didn't go so well here are some of the few photos I took last Sunday.