This video is an interview with Charles Leslie Dishman, 83 years old, of Paris, Kentucky and is part one of a multi-part video series of Charles and of his memories of his family, his birthplace, and of his life.
As I enter my seventh decade, I’m also entering that stage of life where I find myself looking back more and more, in order to review the choices I’ve made, where those choices have taken me, the things I’ve experienced, and the people I’ve met and spent time with along the way.
As a photographer, my impulse has long been to document, document, document as I go along in life. (Even if you’re not a photographer, I encourage you to do this as well. Once you reach the point where there are more years behind you than in front of you, you’ll be glad you did.) Thankfully (from my perspective, at least), that impulse is as strong today as it has ever been. One way I’m channeling that impulse to record lately has been to conduct interviews of my father in order to capture his memories and recollections (he’s 83 years old now) and to learn more about him as a person than just my father.
I’ve produced nine of those videos so far – each approximately five minutes in length – and have been posting them on my You Tube channel. My father – forever completely comfortable in front of the camera – seems to be enjoying them, so I plan to continue the series. I have approximately 70 raw video files left to sort through from the series of interviews I conducted with him in June 2022. I suspect that will give me at least an additional eight or ten videos before I run out of usable footage.
This is chapter four of a multi-part video that features the memories and recollections of long time Paris, KY resident Charles Leslie Dishman, 83 years of age.
I approach this project with only the equipment that I have for my photography work. I don’t have a camera suited specifically for video such as a Red or a Canon C70. Instead … I used the camera that I had in front of me – a Fuji XT-3 and (as a backup) my trusty Canon 5D Mark IV. Both cameras are primarly stills-focused, but also have the capability to 4K video. The Fuji can do f-log recording (which allows for greater flexibility when editing in post), but the Canon does not have c-log. Because of that shortcoming on the Canon, I shot all of the XT-3 footage using the Eterna film simulation. You can definitely see a difference in the Fuji and the Canon footage.
I do have a couple of constant lights (best suited for video), but I was out of state when I recorded the interviews and they were not with me. So … the videos for this personal project were shot with only natural (window) light illuminating my subject. I also don’t currently have a decent audio solution either, so these videos were recorded with only a small Rode directional mic placed on my camera’s hot shoe.
You can hear and see him, but these videos won’t win any awards for lighting, cinematography, or sound. They will however, serve as a partial record of my father’s recollections and memories from his long life that began in the Appalachian region of Kentucky to where he currently lives in the thoroughbred race horse region of Kentucky.
I would like to continue to do this kind of work, to continue to train my brain to move into new creative areas, and to continue to learn and do new things. Stay tuned … I plan to get better at this.
I’m now up to nine chapters. All on YouTube … and all can be seen here.