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Friday, March 23, 2007 - 12:48PM

IntoSummer II Project

By DAN ROBINSON

Editor/Photographer

Back in 2000, I undertook a project to film several winter-to-summer seasonal transition scenes. Starting in mid-March of 2000, I began taking sequential digital photos of seven different landscape scenes as winter transitioned into summer. I finished it in May, and called the series 'IntoSummer'. I planned to keep it for future video projects as well as add to the stock archive. 'IntoSummer' was not an easy task, as I had to find locations that I could easily remember the exact spot that I'd been before - as well as line up the frame as close as possible to the previous shots. You can imagine my dismay when I went to pull the project from my archives recently and for some mysterious reason, I could not find any of the photos I took for that project.

So, to replace the original project and improve upon it, I decided to start a second 'IntoSummer II' with the HD video camera. This time, there will be eleven different scenes, with sequences consisting of intercut video clips joined with slow dissolves to keep realtime motion in the scenes (trees waving in the wind, birds flying, etc). I began this project on March 17 with a fresh coating of snow on the ground (stage #1 of scene #4 is pictured at right), and just completed stage #2 (dry and bare trees) this morning. Some of the trees and bushes around my house are already starting to get buds and blooms, so shot sequence stages #3, #4 and beyond will not be far behind. I'm hoping to get enough material that my upcoming Raleigh trip will not make me miss a critical stage in the scenes' 'greening' process. The winter-spring-summer sequences should end up taking 6 or 7 stages to complete, with another 6 or 7 stages for the summer-fall-winter sequences.

I plan to continue 'IntoSummer II' into the fall, finishing eleven complete four-season transition sequences. Of course, this is a long-term project that I might not get around to posting results for until the end of the year.