My Pandemic Year: 30 Minutes at a Time
By Trish Reynolds
Just about the time the pandemic was beginning, my husband Deon and I were ready to end our cross-country travel adventures of almost two years to find a house to buy and make it our home and studio. It was mid-March, and my birthday, when the country was shutting down to hopefully get the COVID-19 virus under control. We were camped near Yerington, Nevada and pretty much had the entire campground to ourselves. With shelter in place orders by the governor, in a few days, parks would close, and where would we go? The park offered potable water, hot showers, toilets, and a picnic table under a ramada. We had good cell service and enough data to search online for homes. However, as the virus spread and its deadliness became all too real, we decided to postpone our home search as it felt too dangerous to enter the home buying market.
While waiting for the pandemic to run its course and with travel restrictions in place, we felt it necessary to stay in Nevada instead of heading to warmer climes in Arizona like we had previous winters. Weather, temperatures, and road conditions helped us determine where to wild camp next since most established campgrounds were either closed or overrun. Even our favorite wild camping places where we could always find a place to be away from people were overrun with shiny, new RV’s with all their noisy toys. Sometimes we would ping pong back and forth between southern Nevada and Carson City where we would stay in a friend’s garage loft while taking care of business as efficiently as possible and then hit the road again.
Before too long, some of the worst wildfires ever were raging, and now, not only were we trying to avoid people and the pandemic, we had to avoid fire and smoke. Add in extreme heat and it left us with very few safe places to be. We used apps to monitor wind direction and locate fires to find places to be for hopefully at least a few days. Once we found a camp spot, conditions were still generally too extreme for any exercise.
With our studio and most of our art-making supplies in storage, what’s an artist to do? As my grandmother would remind me, “Make do with what you have!” Most people know me as a floral photographer, and I’ll tell you, in comparison to previous springs, not much was blooming in the wild places of Nevada. I’m also interested in birds and other wildlife and had purchased a prosumer camera with a 600 mm lens to play with before plunking down the big bucks for a professional quality lens. Maybe it was just because I had that camera, but, we weren’t noticing too much in the way of wildlife, either. So, I looked to the skies. Nevada has some of the best sky shows whether it is sunrise, sunset, or the middle of the day. Usually, most folks don’t really pay much attention to our skies unless they are lit up pink and orange at first or last light. Time-lapse imagery of weather became my obsession.
As many of us do, I happen to have a very powerful little tool in my hands most of the time. My phone became my main “go to” art-making device as I began exploring time lapse photography of skies and weather. I bought a mount to hold the phone firmly to the tripod. Wind is what makes so many time-lapse movies evocative, creating visibly changing cloud formations that dance across the sky while making shade that seems to magically move overland. It can also destroy your work with one single gust. It only takes once to see your tripod and camera get dumped over to teach you to put even more weight on that tripod to hold it in place. Even with several extra pounds of weight holding the tripod, which seemed secure at the time of set up, as wind built through the day, gusts hitting the camera created bumpy imagery, making it mostly unsuitable. Not one to be deterred by a windy learning curve, I kept at it.
It took some experimentation to figure out how to make longer segments, as with my phone, no matter how long you recorded whether it be five minutes or five hours, it always made a 30-second movie. So, if I want to record for several hours and have the movie run at a pace you could tolerate looking at, every 30 minutes I walk out to the tripod and camera to stop and start a new segment. My old phone’s battery frequently couldn’t support operating such a complex function for very long, so I would connect an auxiliary battery and sometimes solar panels to charge the external battery to complete a full day of recording. My days were frequently based on these 30-minute intervals. Setting a timer, if available is helpful!
It was exciting to review the results, which frequently had unexpected surprises. Birds, insects, deer, sheep, cows, horses, contrails, and dust devils have all been captured in my time-lapse movies. As any time-lapse photographer will tell you, most of what you create ends up being deleted. Despite weather predictions, many of my time lapses were duds or at least portions of them. How do you know where the spectacular clouds and color will be in several hours? You don’t! I’d make my best guess with my single set up and hope for the best.
When the skies weren’t keeping me busy, sounds were. I made stereo recordings of water, birds, animals, and wind to pair with the sped up imagery of our natural world. Delving into video and sound, two worlds I really don’t know much about is a great way to let the pandemic run its course, 30 minutes at a time.
Please watch my short video, Nevada Skies, of time lapse imagery of some of our favorite places in Nevada. Be sure to turn up the volume. Enjoy, and thanks for watching!
© 2021 Trish Reynolds.
Trish Reynolds is one of the Wild Women Artists and had the honor to assist and learn from some of the best photographers in the country. Many will attest she holds several honorary practical life degrees from the University of Hard Knocks. She and her husband, Deon are still on the road passing time 30 minutes at a time, hoping to find home and a studio soon.
Learn more about Trish at www.trishreynolds.com.
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