Sarah Slade

I have a very old Canon 1200D that I bought with some bonus money one year, intending to improve my digital photography skills. Except after a while I decided I didn’t much like digital photography; what I like about photography is the alchemical element, messing around in a dark room with chemicals and watching the image come to life in front of you. Digital doesn’t do that for me.

However, I never really got on with analog film. It was too fiddly, too expensive and I was rubbish at it. I need to start getting to grips with digital video for work, so I decided to dust off the Canon and see what it can do. Being a Mac user also helps, because iMovie is a pretty powerful editing/post-production package and it comes free with my shiny little Macbook.

So here’s the results of the first attempt:

“Hattie Halibut” is an alter ego from my publishing days, resurrected for the purposes of this nonsense. The cat is the bruiser who lives with the posh girls next door, like an embarrassed mobster uncle laying low in his preppy niece’s sorority house. I put it together in iMovie with one of my favourite songs from an old Japan album. Mick Karn’s slidey bass line kind of works with the dodgy focus. While putting my equipment together, I discovered the camera works beautifully, but the tripod has lost its shoe, so apologies for the shaky camera work. Still…work in progress…