Playing around with a camera: Nightshots.

I have officially started to mess around with the camera, playing with ideas, making list of shots too take and toying with different settings.

(DALEEE & STÉPHANIE!!! !!! Help!!! Haha!)

Hopefully, in the end, I can show you guys what it is like here. I have not written much about this place. I find it overwhelming to try and describe it.

There are so many things that I am unable to throw out on paper, my written words do not render the feelings or sights. I find myself unable to explain the things I see in a way that could convey enough meaning for others to “get it”. I think this is when the video idea started… I somehow felt that my writing abilities are somehow too limited to picture the Haiti experience and so I am trying to move to another media to catch it.

I have effectively very limited experience with videomaking but it is worth a try even if just to document for myself what this place is about. It’s all experimental right now: As I said, we are adeering to the “Just pretend you know what your doing” motto… and making sure we have fun doing it.

The other evening, music played far out in the distance. We had just finished our dinner and we spontaneously decided to check out the “party” and see if we could get some good footage with our cameras at night.

Night footage! (Don’t we all love messing with special functions)

… In “night shot”, the camera sends out an infra-red signal and enables us to capture images that are normally to dark to get. So we (my father, Laurence and I) had a “night expedition”, on our motor bikes driving down the city streets (pretty daring in itself; because there is no electricity which means no street lights). The sides of the roads are lined with candlelite merchant stalls. The candlelight give an eerie feeling to the street, you could start believing in ghost here, as there are so many figures that move in the shadows and faces that mysteriously flicker in golden flammes of small fires.

Laurence has been doing really well on the motor bikes. I would say he caught up with me in “confort level” when wizzing through Gonaïves traffic. This night expedition was a first for both of us… Oh the stress!

He really learned to ride from scratch in the worst of conditions. He arrived in the rainy season and so when he first hoped on the bikes the roads were but a series of merged mud puddles…. (huge ones). His first “motorbike initiation course” included:

Lesson # 3:

Riding through mud puddles

1- Don’t panick.

2- Don’t try and lift your feet, they’ll get dirty anyways

3- Cross your fingers that the water/mud puddle not be “that” deep.

4- (most important) : Pick up speed. Make sure you have enough trottle to stop water/mud from coming into the exhaust pipe.

5- Don’t hit rocks, even if you can’t see them.

6- Remember … mud is extremely slippery.

Good luck.