You know the drill: don’t try this at home! (I’ll leave it to you to figure out just what that is.) This FotoFeed image shows where I was.
What we have here is a cool video I just created of footage shot while descending from the west side of the Rio Grande gorge to the Taos Junction Bridge. That’s NM 567, if I’m not mistaken, a rocky dirt road in fairly horrible condition that plunges hundreds of feet down to the river, mostly without guard rails. I did some creative editing and added my own sound track which some of you will recognize.
This one really does need to be viewed full-screen if you can manage it. The video is 1080 x 720 HD and plenty loud once it gets rolling. At first I regretted the rare cloudy day, but then realized the gloom produced the perfect atmosphere. At one point there’s a yelp that sounds like a dog in the cab of my ’87 Ford F-150, except that I don’t have a dog, so it might have been me. (?)
I had reason to, uh, yelp…
John Hamilton Farr lives at 7,000 feet in Ranchos de Taos, New Mexico, U.S.A. As New York Times best-selling author James C. Moore tells it, John is “a man attuned to the world who sees it differently than you and I and writes about it with a language and a vision of life that is impossible to ignore.” This JHFARR.COM site is the master writing archive. To email John, please see CONTACT INFO on .png)
Freakin’ cool!
Ya think? Good thing I was alone on the road!
A+ . Wild and Worthwhile. Just don’t make this descent at night with no headlights!.
It’s a crazy road, Byron. And one of the few ways to get out of that canyon. Glad you liked it! Rough road, horrendous crashing and banging. Quite a place…
Neat little adventure there John. I guess a guy has to go out and get his blood a-pumpin’ somehow. Thank for letting me know about the post.
(Hi Beth)
That’s right, a guy does. 🙂
I just got car sick sitting at my desk.
Beautiful scenery, though!
It was much more nausea-inducing at the regular speed, believe me. Speeding it up helped a lot! And did anyone notice that there are SIX different speeds among the clips?
It occurs to me that you must have been driving one-handed. 🙂
Some day I might invent a little gadget to hold the camera (a by now quite obsolete Kodak Zi6), but I’m sure I got a smoother image by holding the camera in my right hand.
There was no one else on the road, obviously, or I might have done things differently!
maybe you need to find some kind of small Steadicam-type mount (if there is such a thing)? or as you said build you own: it’s basically just springs and counterbalanced weights, but you have to engineer it right.
Another great video: thanks, John.
Glad you liked it, Richard! I had a great time making it.
Nice John! And I thought I had enough vertigo just standing on the bridge way above the gorge, trying to get some interesting pics with the semis blasting past a couple of feet away and the whole bridge bouncing as as they passed. Too much vibration to use a tripod – handholding was more stable!