A couple of years ago, I took a few video clips of the Sandhill Cranes at Whitewater Draw, Arizona, and I planned on one day putting them together and making a short video. Naturally, I never made a video until I needed a brief video to put on my brand-new blog to see how it worked.

These videos were all handheld, quick grabs, but if I can get back into the video thing, I hope to start using a tripod so everything is not so shaky. If I can keep the videos short, I'll be more inclined to make videos more often. so look for some brief, painless videos occasionally…and the shorter they are, the more painless they will be.

Theboondork

Walking in the boulders... four minutes long.

I didn't make this video to be entertaining, and I obviously succeeded. I made it just to get back in the video state of mind by taking a few brief clips and gluing them together without taking the time to make them look good because making a video look good is the hard part. What you see here took me less than half an hour to put together, but to make it look better would have taken me at least half a day.

Why the weird music that has nothing to do with me walking amongst the rocks? It turns out that Simon and Garfunkel's "The Sound of Silence" was one of my favorite songs when it came out in the Summer of 1965. The Fall of 65 also happened to be when I was drafted, and that song ended up being the background music in my brain when I entered the Air Force, so it obviously stuck with me.

And no, that's not Simon and Garfunkel. This is a group called "Disturbed," and I actually like this version better than the original. The power of the singer's voice is incredible. I guess my tastes in music have changed in the last 60-something years.

Theboondork

WARNING

This brief movie was videotaped while walking the entire time, so the picture bounces around enough to make Popeye the sailor man seasick.

It also contains rock 'n' roll music for a soundtrack. It originally contained a lot of wind noise, rocks crunching, and me screaming in pain every time I stepped on a cactus, so the rock 'n' roll music sounds better than that.... but just barely.

Despite all that it has taken me almost a month to make this four-minute video, and I have learned many things, the most important of which is... I shouldn't be making videos.

So let me apologize ahead of time for the length of time it took me to make this abomination, the four minutes of your life that's been wasted watching it, and any future nightmares you may be tormented with anytime you see a picture of a desert.