Thundering Skies

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." So wrote Jane Austen in her classic novel Pride and Prejudice, which was published in the early 1800s and has never been out of print since. Over the past week or so I have been working on the following video:



It is a mass of timelapse footage set to some music that I recorded back in 2001. If I could re-record it today I would chop off the last minute and make the drums more interesting and louder, but the software I used is long-gone. I believe it was mostly rendered with an early version of VAZ Modular, a software synthesiser with a big fat sound, and a sequencer called Cakewalk, but whatever files and samples I used are lost to time.

The video was shot with a 5D Mk II, almost entirely with two lenses, an Olympus 24mm f/2.8 and a Nikon 75-150mm f/3.5. They are small and light, which is important when you're carrying around a camera and a tripod. They are also manual focus, but that isn't a problem when shooting timelapse video of distant clouds. The two lenses would make a great holiday kit, if you added a fast 50mm in there somewhere, or simply ignored the middle focal lengths. The 75-150mm has a relatively short maximum range, but that's what cropping was invented for!

Also, I have recently been pondering the word stroll, which has a very precise meaning. Only a man can stroll, for example, and he cannot be a ruffian. Strolling is not the pursuit of anything, but it is not aimless ambling either. It is not wandering or staggering or hiking or striding or slouching or sidling or any of those. It is not even walking, because it takes place exclusively on the flat.