Crazy Horse Memorial in South Dakota

Located in the Black Hills of South Dakota, the Crazy Horse Memorial is a work in progress that has been ongoing for decades. Located less than 20 miles from Mount Rushmore, the Crazy Horse Memorial is being funded by admissions without help from the federal government. If completed, it will be the largest sculpture in the world. This is what it looked like in April 2007.

This is how the finished monument is intended to look.

Samsung SC-D453 Video Camera

It was just after Christmas in 2005 that I decided to spring for a MiniDV camera. I'd been shooting several projects in film school on MiniDV and after collecting a small collection of tapes I thought I would benefit from having a DVcam of my own.

There was nothing complicated about my choice. I picked this little Samsung because it was compact, no bigger than my hand, and it seemed ideal for traveling with. Truthfully, I didn't feel I needed a major quality upgrade so much as I needed a format upgrade to output my video to the new MiniDV standard.  For home video sake and after carrying around my Sony handycam in LA and Vegas, it was nice to have something a lot lighter.

The weaknesses of this camera are a result of it's small size.  There aren't a lot of extra features, although it does have an impressive 900x digital zoom. As a casual camera for Internet vlogs or home video, you really don't need much more.  This was 2005 though, and cameras like the Flip HD (which I now own) have made the market for this type of shooting a lot more competitive. 

The first thing I did with this camera was a project titled, A Chill in the Air in January 2006. It opened a lot of doors for me, and was actually directly involved in my next camera upgrade that spring. To this day I still use this camera for casual shooting and experiments. I took with me to Vegas again, and use it mainly to capture home videos. It's still a sleek, unassuming, and easy to use little piece of equipment.

University of Regina Campus Snapshots

As the summer of 2007 came to a close, I found myself nostalgic about all the time I'd spent at the University of Regina.  At the time I was wrapping up a few summer school courses, and was about to enter my final year of film school.  

I've always been keen on documenting things, but I had grown up a lot since my first time doing something like this. After seeing the University of Regina undergo some massive upgrades during my time there (including new twin tower residences, an athletics facility, and a lab building) I thought it would be worth while to capture the campus as it was before I left. To capture it so that I could compare it to the way I remembered it whenever I'd go back there.  

Here are a few of my snapshots from that summer in 2007.

For more, check out my campus photo collage.