So last week was a bizarre week. I got a call last Saturday to see if I wanted to accompany a pair of journalists from Time Magazine’s The Drive website as their videographer in a new 2016 Camaro on a road trip from Portland to San Francisco for their Find New Roads campaign. The thing is, we had 36 hours to cover 800 miles.
Now, on the one hand, this was insanely exciting as an experience. Not to mention, that Camaro handles quite well in all the conditions we had it in, including at least 200 miles of nausea inducing twists and turns and curves. This is great fun for those in the front seats, especially the driver, but for me in the back seat…eh…I’ve never felt like puking from a car drive before this one.
And it happened 3 times.
However, I attribute that to the driver, not the car. He was certainly testing the limits of that beast, and the lack of ‘oh shit’ handles had my ‘oh shits’ unleashed more times than even I felt comfortable with, but judging by the fact that I’m still alive, he knew what he was doing, that’s for sure.
Now, on the other hand, as a photographer, this was pure and utter torture. We drove through the Redwood National and State Parks (NPS), the Avenue of Giants, Oregon’s insanely gorgeous countryside, the Pacific Coast Highway from Eureka and Humboldt and Mendocino through Fort Bragg, all the way down the coast to San Francisco. It was all insanely gorgeous country, arguably some of the most incredible in the world. But it was literally like being in heaven and then being kidnapped back to purgatory in a blur – a serious tease that would give any of Portland’s legendary strip clubs a run for their money – from golden fall colored vineyards to smoky Oregonian mountains to fall-colored tree-canopied one lane country roads and movie quality s-curves and riverside valleys laden with giant redwoods and legendary pines, to northern California’s pristine lost coast.
Just about ALL of this has been on my bucket list for a long long long long long time, so I was happy that I’d finally get to do it, HOWEVER, we only got to stop maybe 4 or 5 times, mostly for pee breaks, for a total of about 30-45 minutes through all this, so never got to set up for a single shot. Not one.
At all.
In the most beautiful spots of Oregon and California.
I, along with my cameras, were whimpering loudly and considerably.
Anyhow, save for some GoPro footage, the video portions were all shot on Samsung NX1 and Samsung NX500, both of which handled wonderfully under all the circumstances.
Click here for the article on TheDrive.com for the driver’s version of events.
And here’s a video of my version of what happened:
As far as stills, figured roll with the punches (and the hairpin twists and turns) and went with the mobile phone for the mobile pictures. Here is my 36 hour trip, from Portland to San Francisco, by Samsung Galaxy Note 5 and edited in Snapseed. It starts with my flight leaving Los Angeles to Portland, and ends with return flight back to Los Angeles from San Francisco.
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