I was driving to psychology class today, which is usually when my brain decides to open seventeen unrelated tabs, and somewhere in the middle of thinking about Born & Raised I remembered that I own a Zoom H4 recorder. This would not be remarkable except that I forget I own the Zoom H4 recorder with such consistency that it might as well belong to somebody else. So I texted Casey and asked him to find it.
The H4 is actually perfect for what I keep saying I want to do at Born & Raised, which makes the fact that I repeatedly forget about it even more ridiculous. Put two AA batteries in it, make sure there is room on the SD card, turn it on and leave it alone. If things get busy in the media tent, it can just sit there collecting whatever happens while I am doing something else. That is exactly my speed. I am not trying to build CNN inside a festival tent. I want to be able to hear somebody say, “Hey, so-and-so is over here,” pick something up and go.
There will be scheduled interviews and things we already know we are looking for, but I am much more interested in whatever happens around those things. Somebody showing up who was not on the list. A conversation that starts before anybody realizes it has become interesting. Maybe Jamie Lin winds up around a handful of songwriters in the VIP tent and something happens that nobody planned. That is the kind of thing I do not want to miss because I was looking for a cable.
Then I remembered that Shauna “WhiskeyChick” Castorena gave us a couple of little lav mics, and suddenly I was mentally taking inventory of the rest of the house. We already have the H4. We have my iPhone 16 Pro Max and a tripod. We have the Nikon D7500. We have an iPad Pro and a laptop. We have the lavs. At some point you have to admit that maybe the problem is not a lack of equipment. Maybe you just need to remember where you put it.
Casey is D’ark’s Director of Photography, or Wizard of All Things Gear, depending on how official we are being. Settings and setup come naturally to him in a way they simply do not to me, which works out rather well considering I would rather be watching what is happening around us than arguing with a menu on a camera. The better part is that he is watching too.
We notice the same kinds of small things, but we do not necessarily notice the same ones. I can be completely absorbed in something happening in one direction while he has already clocked the expression on somebody’s face across the room, somebody coming through the door, a technical issue, or something developing in the background. He is naturally aware of our surroundings anyway. He is my partner and protector, and keeping an eye on what is happening around us is already part of how he moves through the world. Give him a camera and that attention to detail has somewhere to go. Between the two of us, we get more of the room.
That is how I want to work at Born & Raised. I do not want to spend the weekend lugging around so much shit that the equipment becomes the event. The irony is that the iPhone will probably do most of the heavy lifting. Nobody cares about phones anymore. Everybody has one out. You can be standing three feet away from somebody with a phone in your hand and barely register as a camera. Pull out a Nikon and suddenly everybody remembers posture.
I hate posed photos anyway. They have their place. There will undoubtedly be a few of those lovely “everybody stand here” moments, and that is probably when the Nikon comes out. I will take the picture. Everyone will smile. We will all survive. But those are rarely the images I remember.
I remember the stuff happening behind the picture. The songwriter meeting somebody whose work they have admired for years. The person mouthing every word from the back of the room. The second somebody becomes a fan. The tear you catch before they wipe it away because a song just attached itself to something in their life and they are going to remember that moment long after everybody has forgotten what was on the festival schedule that day.
You cannot stage that. You cannot ask somebody to do it again. And if you are standing there screwing a microphone onto something when it happens, congratulations on your excellent microphone.
So this week I am trying something revolutionary. Before I buy another damn thing, I am going to figure out how to use what we already own.
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