We were assigned a project for our Intro to Media Arts class at Lane Community College. The project was innocently named “Image Editing”, but the theme was “Five”. Five of what? I asked myself. Five was the theme for a two minute video and we were left with creative control over what five meant to us. I had a packed weekend ahead of me with class projects and work. I found a way to integrate the creation of the materials for my project into a walk I had to travel through in Downtown Eugene. It was a bit out of my way but not too far off from the bank I had to walk to.

As you can see in the map above, I was dropped off near the University of Oregon Campus and walked to 5th Street Market to keep the theme of 5. Every 5 minutes of this walk I took 5 pictures, I stopped to take these pictures 5 times over my journey. In this video you will see my journey.

It was not too hard to come up with an idea. I wrote down many ideas in a notepad over the course of a couple of minutes during class and the hard part was narrowing my ideas down. Some were complex and I knew that I had a busy weekend ahead of me. So I chose this simple idea. I am okay with how the video turned out. Freesound.org had thousands of free sounds for me to use to create the ambient water, traffic and gusty wind sounds that I wanted to use to help the viewer immerse in the experience I had. It helps.

So there is more to the story of how I created this short photography series project. I had a camera checked out from Lane CC’s Media checkout center that I used for a Portrait Photography project that Friday morning. The checkout called me that morning to let me know that I was late to return the camera and could I get to school to drop off the camera between 1-2pm. I jumped on a bus and turned the camera in on time, the guys at the Media Equipment Checkout Center were really cool about me dropping of the camera late and asked me if I would like to hold onto the camera for the rest of the weekend. Since I knew I was going to have to be all over town that day I said, “No”. This is why many of my photos are such poor quality, I used my cellphone camera for the pictures and immediately regretted not checking the camera out. However, I have learned through a photographer on YouTube, Chase Jarvis, that the best camera is the one that you have on you, and he promotes using whatever camera you have, cellphone or SLR. This was the challenge.

Editing and pulling the photos together into a final product is the most fun part for me. I didn’t have a lot of time but you’ll see what I did. I hope this video doesn’t keep anyone from wanting to take a walk through Downtown Eugene. I somehow chose a less beautiful path to shoot this project, but was challenged to try to find interesting shots where interesting objects were usually hard to find.

See below my favorite images from the walk: