Hay Bailing in Maine | New England Videography

I don’t often get to shoot video just for fun, but I enjoyed getting to do a little bit of New England videography a few weeks ago.  I went up to Maine to visit my grandmother.  For those who don’t know, she lives in the hills, surrounded by fields and farms.  She also happens to live right across the street from Double Z Land and Livestock.

If you’ve been following my work for a while now, you’ve probably seen many photos of the infamous tree across the street from her house.  Well, Double Z is located right next to/behind that tree.  A few visits back, I got to see their cows grazing in the pasture right across the street.  I get pretty excited about stuff like that.

I went outside with my camera planning to take some photos of the long grass and flowers in the field next door.  I didn’t realize until I got out there that there was a crew cutting the grass and bailing hay.  I also didn’t realize that it happened to be the Double Z crew.  My aunt tells me that they’ve used their horses to cut the grass in the past as well.  The horses weren’t out today, but it was still cool to watch.  I decided to take the opportunity to gather some footage.

I was a little limited by my gear, as I only had a photo tripod.  If you’ve ever tried to do a pan while shooting video on a photo tripod, it’s a bit challenging.  The pan isn’t really smooth and it’s difficult to adjust the pan and tilt at the same time without shooting video that’s totally useless.  I would have liked to have had some more camera movement throughout the video, but I still got some good footage, so I went with it.  Here’s the video that I put together.

One other thing that I really like about visiting my grandmother is the lack of light pollution at night.  You can see the sky so clearly.  I borrowed the Canon 70D from work so I could play around with the mobile app.  Luckily I went out when we arrived on Friday because it was cloudy and the weather wasn’t so great Saturday evening.  I was hoping to go out with my Nikon on Saturday.  I was mostly experimenting and didn’t get a lot of shots, but here’s one that I really liked.