It's been about a month, so surely it's time for another update.
The Washington, D.C. trip came and went a few weeks ago. For the first time, I kinda got to "peak rubber stamp" considering how saturated the week was. Looking through my notebook those few days I landed something like 65 different stamps. Most were directly related to ones you could find at National Park sites, but that's totally fine considering it being the main reason I drove about 3,200 miles in seven days.
There's also the new buddies I made out in eastern Tennessee. Picasso Gaglione and Darlene Domel let me spend most of the day at their place in Knoxville and talk rubber stamps till I ran out of hard drive space (and then some). They were both incredibly kind, interesting, and their creative worlds and experiences went way beyond the scope of my rubber stamp documentary.
With all the stamp hunting between Oklahoma City and D.C., I'm pretty sure I found the best egg sandwich in the country at Fox In The Snow Cafe in Columbus, OH. I'd already had at least three coffees in about four hours, so I can't speak to their espresso offerings but damn that sandwich probably changed my life. There's something to be said too about A Dopo Sourdough Pizza in Knoxville, TN and how I'll be making my own pizza dough plus thanks to A Baked Joint in D.C. for reintroducing to Tabasco sauce. And thank goodness to the coffee shop owner at Redhawk Coffee in Pittsburg who kinda blew my mind with a quote about "cup stamping being the backbone of the hipster economy."
For the actual National Park Travelers Club conference in DC, I'd not really had a plan going into it. All I knew was what I'd learned during my interview with Mike Brown back in June and some of the time I'd spent on their website. Ideally I'd have gone into the event as a producer with wireless video signal and headphones connected a dedicated camera op and production sound mixer/boom op. But, there I was like an idiot trying to do all the nonsense myself seeing as how I didn't have an additional $1k-1500/day to hire out a crew.
I'm pushing hard on this project to do what I can with what I have, so I was out there with my RED Weapon, a set of prime lenses, and some filtration/NDs. If I were to do it again, I'd have tried to spent the $1k to rent out a couple of the Angenieux EZ cinema zooms for the week and at least used a monopod vs. trying to keep the camera package as SUPER lean and unobtrusive as possible while filming the conference. I'd also planned to shoot some sit-down interviews with convention go-ers back in my hotel room, but that never panned out. This project is more a marathon than a sprint, so I'll probably be making some changes as I go.
I'm still hoping to make it overseas and meet up with some connections I've made (London, Melbourne, etc) plus get some of the Eki train stamps in Japan, but that's quite a bit of money I'll need to come up with to make that happen. Seeing as how I'm planning to pay for all this via my stock footage revenue, I did shoot quite a bit of skyline footage with my drone while I was out (Little Rock, Nashville, Pittsburgh, Columbus, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, St. Louis) plus a handful of things with my RED. I'm also considering reaching out to some production companies and other connections I've made over the years to see if those could be options to help fund this nonsense.