ExclusiveDocumenting beauty in nature: an EcoSalon exclusive with photographer Ben Canales and new “Finding Oregon” timelapse.

Sometimes we need reminders of who we are and what is important. Finding Oregon is one of those reminders. Shot in Oregon, and produced by Uncage the Soul Productions, the video is a composite of timelapses, giving us an intimate look at the day and night sky in some of the most remote places in this western state known for its natural resources and beauty.

This video is a fresh respite from our everyday, overloaded, technology dependent, lives. It reminds us of the natural rhythms that we have almost become unaccustomed to, reintroducing us to the power and routine of nature.

Photographer and Uncage the Soul team member Ben Canales knows a thing or two about timelapses, and in this EcoSalon exclusive behind-the-scenes he shares his inspiration and process, giving us a look into the reality of creating a magical 3 minutes.

Finding Oregon from Uncage the Soul Productions on Vimeo.

How long did you film for?

About 70% of the timelapse sequences were shot in one intense, week-long road trip going to all four of the furthest corners of Oregon, but the remainder was filmed throughout 2010-2011.

This is a great question, because we ourselves, didn’t realize just how much work is involved until we got serious about this project. It is shocking how much energy, time, and equipment goes into getting one, six second video clip. For instance, a glowing tent clip from Crater Lake demanded a dedicated three day trip out of town, location scouting in the day to find the perfect spot for the night, a three mile trek through the snow with all the equipment to the spot, setup for an hour and then wait for nightfall.

The actual filming takes 2-4 hours to record a good night timelapse of the stars moving, and then pack up, hike out, and drive home the next day. That is only the work done in the field! Then there are hours and hours of processing, editing, and polishing the final video sequence to get only six seconds of final video.

It is not an exaggeration to say one short, final clip may represent 20-30 hours of planning, driving, hiking, shooting, and processing- all that for mere seconds of video playback. It is a ridiculous labor of love.

The biggest challenge is the timing lining up to be in the right place at the right time. These starry night timelapses have a surprising amount of requirements to get the bright, beaming epic payoff. First, the moon should be around the New Moon phase (no moon) so as not to outshine the stars, so that means we get a window of about five days a month. Next, weather must be cooperative with a dependable expectancy of cloudless skies. Here in Oregon, only the summer months have a good chance of clear skies. So that means, we have three months in the year, with a 5 day window each month to plan, with fingers crossed, for epic star shooting conditions. That’s only 15 days in a year.

Then, you hope that something doesn’t come up in regular life to pull you away to other obligations on those few days. It is a maddening challenge to get all the factors to line up to be in the right place at the right time. But, when it does happen- it is such a satisfying feeling.

*Groan* Yes… it’s painful to think about. We had set up a motion controlled timelapse that lifted the camera over a boulder to reveal a desert arch framing the passing Milky Way and stars. It is a beautiful sight and not one I’ve seen anyone else capture in this location. We were really excited because this shot would be one of the top five sequences in the final video. We spent the first half of the night finding the spot in the dark, lugging the equipment up the hill to the location and then meticulously setting it all up. We were short on sleep, but pushed through the fatigue because the shot was more than worth it.

Finally, everything was set, the Milky Way was fast approaching and showing up in the arch. We fired off a few test shots, turned it on to run the whole night and then trudged back to camp for some desperately needed sleep. Hours later, we came back, excited to see the final result, but it turned out the power cord to the battery was loose and slight movement had disconnected the power source only 20 minutes after we left it. It was a complete loss.

Next summer the stars and Milky Way will line up there again through that arch like it has for thousands of years, and maybe we’ll be lucky enough to be back to get it.

We’ve filmed the Columbia River Gorge, Mt Hood and the surrounding area, Mt Jefferson, the Southwestern Coast, the Alvord Desert, Leslie Gulch, Blue Mountains, Crater Lake, Eagle Cap Wilderness, Deschutes River, and more. We’re proud to have touched all four corners of the state; however, Oregon is the kind of place that the more you see, the more you realize you’ve missed and haven’t seen yet!

Absolutely. We were inspired to make this film because of the personal experiences our team has individually had in Oregon. But, we would be honored to have the opportunity to capture and showcase the unique beauty of other regions through our cameras. Hopefully films like this will inspire and excite others to go beyond their normal routines and see some of the beautiful regions beyond their own backyards.

This is a question that each of our team members would probably uniquely answer in their own way, so I can only speak for myself in this moment. I am inspired to make this film to share the moments of beauty and awe in nature with those that don’t have the opportunity to see it themselves.

I go to great lengths to get far from the city, beyond its reach, to get to the wild and free places. For me, it is an honor and a joy to try to capture some of these moments and bring back something to share of my own experience. I am literally in awe of the wild beauty of snow capped mountains, immensely flat desert horizons, violently rugged coastal sea stacks, infinitely sparkling starry night skies, exploding colors of sunsets and sunrises, and so on. If there’s a chance I can capture some of that to share with others and/or bring awareness for the need to protect these special places, I find inspiration there.

Learn more about Uncage the Soul Productions work here.

ExclusiveArtist Alicia Escott’s intensely humane explorations of loss, longing, commercialism and ultimately, love.

“The best way I can express this is that I have lost enough hope to find a new hope.”

San Francisco-based artist Alicia Escott tells me this over coffee at The Summit, a popular cafe in the Mission District. We’re talking frankly, not philosophically, about pragmatic challenges of creativity and environmental issues, specifically, how one can retain any sort of optimism, much less focus, in the face of the enormous ecological challenges we face. (There have been six great “die offs”; we are poised for another.) “I heard an environmentalist being interviewed once,” she is saying. “The journalist asked him how he was okay with eating meat or some other destructive behavior. He answered, something like, ‘You know, you wake up in the morning, you take a shower then you walk around the corner to get coffee. It’s 9 a.m. and you have already walked over a mountain of skulls.’”

Escott is thoughtful, though not measured. She pauses for fresh lengths between questions.

“I function with a dichotomy that is extreme in a sense – I both think it’s perhaps ‘too late’ for humans but I also think about things from an evolutionary point of view,” she says. “Humans came out of great tumult. We are on the verge of another tumult. So I feel daily heartbreak; yet I also feel hope.”

Escott has already made a name for herself in environmental circles for her subtly captivating pieces that use disposable packaging as a medium for transcribing objects of both life and destruction. There is a bear on a bag seemingly expiring in undergrowth, a trout as litter in a stream (literally a fish out of water), and an atom bomb test on a to-go sushi container. (The last was too popular in a sense, says Escott. “They are so optically beautiful they trick you. That was a distraction from what I’m really wanting to talk about, so I did not make more.”)

The work, most notably that created on plastic sacks and film, is so fragile as to be temporary; the fleeting hand-drawn images are something like a compassionate catalog of the living past, or what will soon be our past. The art will not survive, and in fact, is not meant to – Escott has entire series expressly created to be recycled. But to describe her as an environmental artist or to view her work as somehow ironic is to miss the point.

“My approach is one of a thoughtful person, not only as an environmentalist, activist, or green advocate,” Escott says. “I am very hesitant about labels. I think we are making mistakes, and I have a lot of pain around these issues…but it’s really not for me to say. Us poisoning our oceans may return us, simply, to a primordial soup. Perhaps something better can come out of it. So my approach is holistic.”

There are eternal, contextually unsettling and shamanistic themes in Escott’s work. In a recently commenced series, she sends “Love Letters,” dated from the past, to acquaintances and friends alike. The letters include faded sepia and black and white photographs of simple scenes like children in yards and flocks of birds. The letters are poetic, eerie, profoundly haunting – and just slightly creepy. “It’s interesting playing with that tension,” she says with a mischievous smile. It’s clearly also enjoyable. My own Love Letter (“Love Letter to a Thick Billed Ground Dove. Extinct 1927.”) begins with “Last week I set the clock on my iPhone to December 18th, 1914″ and includes the following line:

“Then came rock n roll. More than anything I wish I could show you rock n roll, you would love it, I’m sure. And there was the telephone, and then answering machines and call waiting and then caller id, and now you can have that with you always. Honestly.

There would never need to be these distances anymore.”

My notebook contains this list of words I jotted down before meeting with Escott, and I share them with her.

Bereft

Buddhist

Longing

Acceptance

Human

Lonely

Heartbreak

Healing

I ask if the Buddhist tendency is intentional. I’m the first writer to do so, and she considers it for a long moment. “My work tracks the heart – attachment, loss.” There is an unmistakable healing quality to the approach. “I work from the perspective of the human condition and more so the condition of life,” she says.

Alicia Escott

“I used to talk more about the evils of plastic and was focused on didactic aims,” Escott says. “Now, I am talking about something more esoteric, I view plastic as [among other things] a metaphor for talking about the packaging of our lives. Ideas are virtualized. They are commoditized – they are Likes on Facebook.”

The works’ comment on contemporary culture’s materialism and collective isolation is a compassionate treatment. She says she deals with complex issues simply, but her creations are pure more than anything else. Hence the trouble with labels.

“Consciousness must occur on many layers; it’s not just green. It’s easy to get bogged down by categories – but we shouldn’t stay too long.”

Images courtesy Alicia Escott. Works featured are from the series Littered Drawings.