Drive about three and a half hours north of Albuquerque and you come to Pagosa Springs, Colorado. Drive a little further up the road and you reach the Bruce Spruce Ranch. In my opinion it is one of the most beautiful places on the planet, and my family have been coming here since 1992.
You are probably thinking: Matt, this is not a wedding video, what is going on?
I have not made a travel film since 2017, when I went to Iceland. I went to Alaska the year after and actually filmed everything for one, and then never took the time to edit it. So I told myself that for this trip I was going to Colorado and I was actually going to make the film.
And I know that when people talk about travel films on YouTube there is usually an electronic track, a lot of zoom transitions and Luma fades. This is not going to be that.
If you want to see what came out the other end, here is Always 1992, the finished film.
Night One: The Easiest Timelapse Setup I Will Ever Get
The perk of being out in the middle of nowhere is that I do not have to go far to set up a timelapse. In this case the cabin was literally right there.
Straight behind me were pine trees, and above them, stars. So I set the camera nearly vertical, pointing up, to get some foreground of the trees with the stars behind. A bit of movement out of the sky and it should look great.
Sony a7S II, Sigma 24mm, shooting RAW photos at f/1.4, ISO 5000, five second exposures.
The trick that night was working around the moon. The moon is bright enough to wash the stars out, so I faced the opposite direction to it. Because the Milky Way extends all the way over the top of you, I could still catch the tail end of it. Is that the term? The butt of the Milky Way. Yeah, I guess so.
If I sound like I am huffing and puffing in any of this, it is because I live in Austin, Texas, which is at sea level, and I was at seven or eight thousand feet.
Flying With A Shot Already In Your Head
Next morning, around eight, I walked over to the pond to fly the Mavic. Everyone was still waking up so I wanted to keep it quiet, but the weather was beautiful and sunlight was already hitting the side of the mountain.
Here is the thing I always do before I fly, and it matters more than anything technical: I always have the shot in my head before I take off. If you just start flying, you will not know what you are trying to film. Visualise the shot beforehand and it is dramatically easier to come home with something good.
In this case I knew I wanted the mountain with sunlight appearing on it. When I was setting up, the mountain was still mostly under cloud, and I thought, maybe those clear for a minute. And they did, and it was incredible. A beautiful patchwork of shadows across the mountain face.
Both of the drone shots in this film were shot on a DJI Mavic 2 Pro, 4K at 30fps, in DLOG-M. That first flight was f/4 at ISO 100 with no ND filter. The one above, out over the valley from the top of the Continental Divide, was f/5.6 at ISO 100 with an ND 16.
Finding The Story
Leading up to this trip I had been trying to work out how to tell a story through the film rather than just showing pretty shots. Which raises the obvious question: how do you tell a story about a trip to Colorado?
I got lucky, twice.
First: I have footage of my family’s first trip to this exact place in 1992. Super gritty, super grainy, shot on a VHS camcorder my parents brought along. So many slow zooms and fade-to-whites. Classic old school home video.
Second: my family came back in 2013, and on that trip I brought my Canon 7D and shot a pile of timelapses. And there was a forest fire burning while we were here, so some of the cliffs behind the ranch were lit up and glowing at night with smoke coming off them.
So the plan became this. Film a lot of pretty stuff. Get footage of me and my brother hanging out the way we did in the 1992 tapes, which should make a nice juxtaposition between us as children and us as adults. Then cut it together with a personal voiceover.
Motion Timelapses Are About Parallax
The morning after a night of rain, the mountains were full of cloud, so I took the motion timelapse rig back over to the pond.
Motion timelapses are all about parallax. You want foreground and you want background. So I set the tripod and the Rhino ROV Pro slider up close to a tree, with no wind about, hoping to get a nice reveal as the slider pans out from behind the trunk to show the mountain with the clouds moving over it.
The sun came out about halfway through, which would normally ruin a sequence. But I could blend the exposure between highlights and shadows and make it work, which is one of the perks of shooting stills in RAW rather than recording video.
The Settings, All In One Place
Every timelapse and drone shot in the film, with what it was shot on:
| Shot | Settings |
|---|---|
| Stars over the pines | a7S II, Sigma 24mm, RAW, f/1.4, ISO 5000, 5 sec |
| Forest aerial | Mavic 2 Pro, 4K 30fps, DLOG-M, f/4, ISO 100, no ND |
| Daytime detail | a7S II, Zeiss 50mm, RAW, f/2, ISO 100, 1/50 sec |
| Milky Way | a7S II, Sigma 24mm, RAW, f/1.4, ISO 10,000, 2.5 sec |
| Valley aerial | Mavic 2 Pro, 4K 30fps, DLOG-M, f/5.6, ISO 100, ND 16 |
| Night slider move | a7S II, Sigma 24mm, RAW, f/1.4, ISO 10,000, 2 sec, Rhino ROV Pro |
| Creek bed slider move | a7S II, Sigma 24mm, RAW, f/2.8, ISO 100, 1/5 sec, Rhino ROV Pro |
On the 2.5 second exposure specifically: there were a lot of clouds in that frame, and I wanted a long enough shutter that the clouds were not tearing across the sky at rocket speed.
Shooting The Same Place For A Week Without Repeating Yourself
The hard part of shooting timelapses in one location for several days is that it gets stale fast. You take a pretty shot of a mountain and then think, well, that is the mountain, done.
That is lazy. There are other shots. It just takes longer to find them.
On the last full day it was raining, which does not mean you cannot shoot, because there were gorgeous clouds sitting on the mountain. It took me about half an hour of walking to find a spot down on Wolf Creek that I had never been to, where you could look straight up the creek bed at the mountain with fog and cloud rising off it. Genuinely beautiful, and I would never have found it if I had settled for the shot I already had.
Same principle for the things that are not landscapes. Slow motion at 120fps of my brother and me fishing at the pond, which cuts beautifully against the old footage of us as kids. Hummingbirds at the feeder. A chipmunk at the base of a fence post.
One thing worth knowing if you shoot with a baby along: I did not attempt any long-shadow daytime timelapses on this trip. Those need several hours of leaving a camera somewhere and babysitting it, and with an actual baby to look after, I had other things to do.
How It Ended
I had hoped this trip would finish on some enormous high note, with one last morning of the most epic timelapse or the best drone shot I have ever flown.
Instead it poured with rain and we packed up and left. And that is okay.
Thanks for coming along. Go and watch the film if you have not. And if you want the full list of what I shoot with, it is all here.