Water#1 from Bryan Whitson on Vimeo.
Not long after moving to DC following grad school, I started working on photos of the surfaces of water. They are not really about the place they were shot (which was mostly the tidal basin near the Jefferson Memorial) so much as simply the beauty of water and the way it looked totally different from one shot to another and one day or week to another. I worked on them on and off for a year or two, but put them on the back burner.
Recently I was thinking about them again and wondered if video might be an interesting way to start them back up again. I’ve been looking a the Nikon D7000 as a potential upgrade for my current DSLR so last weekend I rented one with a 24mm lens to test it out. I was particularly interested in the video capabilities, so I went down to the Tidal Basin and shot some footage of the water. Two birds with one stone. The above scene is from that little experiment. I also got to learn a little about Adobe After Effects, thanks to my co-worker and After Effects Jedi Yan Goldshmid, so I could tweak the color and exposure a bit. Below is a still image I shot at the same time. I still think there is somewhere to go with them as well.
