Basketball Skills turned into Photography Adventure?

Colorful clouds over some Californian hills - still frame from my timelapse

As my hometown Warriors are in the NBA finals again, I thought I tell a story of a time when my basketball skills resulted a memorable evening with my brother and mom. The last time the internet saw my basketball skills was a couple of summers ago when I made the juggling video with my brother. And yes, I did make that shot on the first try – no special editing tricks! Now fast forward to last summer when I started my summer internship at FireEye. For a couple of times each week, my manager and I along with a handful of others would play basketball after work. Some days it would just be 2 on 2, but other days we had enough people to play full court.

After my mom and I came home from work one day, I was playing around with my brother in our family room when I decided that it would be a good idea to bet my brother. See the thing about being a landscape photographer is that I am always longing to go outside when the light and conditions are good. Aside from being at a location at the right time of day, clouds can really make or break a landscape photograph. Clouds can really change the mood of the photograph. If the clouds catch light, then it can add that magical feeling to the image; however, if the clouds are low, they can block out the sunlight creating a much more atmospheric scene.

So after work that day, I was checking a handful of weather applications in addition to looking at various webcams to get an idea of what the conditions may look in a few hours for sunset. Once I figured the conditions would be good enough for an evening hike, I just had to convince someone to come with me. After asking my mom, she said that she would go if my brother also went. So, all I had to do was convince my brother to get out of the comfy confines of our house for an evening hike. This brings me back to my brother and I playing around in our family room. See, in our family room, we have a mini basketball hoop installed against the wall above the entrance to the room. So, I bet my brother that if I made the shot on the first try from across the room, we would all go on the evening hike. As luck would have it, I did indeed make the shot on the first try.

Fog rolling over the hills - still frame from my timelapse

We all quickly packed some bags and hopped into the car to drive up the hills for a short sunset hike. After a pretty short hike, we reached the viewpoint and got to take in all the colors of sunset. The clouds were there just as I expected in addition to some low-lying fog rolling over the hills – although both were not in the same direction. I set up my camera with the telephoto lens for a couple of timelapses (the two photos above) to capture the motion in the clouds and rolling fog. In both of my timelapses, I had my camera in aperture priority mode with my intervalometer set to take a photo every six seconds. I edited these timelapses with Lightroom Classic and LRTimelapse, and then compiled them together in After Effects. Unfortunately, I didn’t upload the final timelapse videos, but they might eventually make it into one of my YouTube videos sometime in the future.

While we were waiting around for the sunset, I also took these photos below to capture the small details and moments that we experienced on our hike. Interestingly, all of these except for one were taken with my phone. At the end of the day, I think it is not about the photos that I took, but rather the memories and stories attached to those photos – and that is more than enough.