When Mike asked me what my dream job is, I told him that I’d be a direc­tor. So he asked me to direct the next seg­ment of his doc­u­men­tary because I tend to have a good sense of the larg­er scope when it comes to sto­ry­telling, and that would let him focus on the cin­e­matog­ra­phy and the inter­view.

Our roles over­lapped more often than not since this was his cre­ative vision, but that only meant we made a great team. I could bounce an idea off him, and he’d imme­di­ate­ly under­stand what I was talk­ing about. And if he saw a tech­nique I could do bet­ter, he’d tell me how to work dif­fer­ent­ly and I’d under­stand with­out need­ing an expla­na­tion.

It’s fas­ci­nat­ing to get a glimpse into some­one else’s pho­to­graph­ic process. I’d love to include more in this video because there were a lot of bril­liant, touch­ing, inti­mate moments dur­ing the inter­view, but it’s Mike’s project and it would­n’t be right to reveal the con­cept to the world before he did.

When the shoot­ing was done for the day, some­thing which took sev­er­al hours and left us thor­ough­ly exhaust­ed, we took the night off for food and more pho­tog­ra­phy.

Cockburns hag­gis with clap­shot (pota­toes mashed with swede turnips and chives) and onion gravy. I could­n’t pos­si­bly resist order­ing hag­gis while in Scotland. It has a taste sim­i­lar to ground beef, only with a much rich­er taste. Eating this gave me the meat sweats.

We rent­ed Canon’s EF 400mm f/2.8 L IS lens to film parts of the doc­u­men­tary, which meant we could also get some nice moon shots too at such a focal length. This lens is so big, the case has wheels.

100% crop.

I want­ed to see if I could get a few shots of a tiny vil­lage across the water, and it turns out they hap­pened to be set­ting off fire­works at that exact moment. I did­n’t even real­ize this until I looked back on the pho­tos on my dis­play. It was much too dark to see with the naked eye, and only showed up when I left the shut­ter open for 25 sec­onds.

Europe 2010 travel diaries

• France: Arrival
• France: Day 3, Chartres
• The Partisan
• France: Day 5, Chartres
• Baby Scary Party
• France: Day 6, Paris
• Call me McNgangus
• France: Day 7, Rochefort-en-Terre
• France: Day 8, La Roche-Bernard
• France: Day 9, Rochefort-en-Terre
• UK Detour: Day 10, Chartres to London
• UK Detour: Day 11, London
• A pas­sen­ger in London
• UK Detour: Day 12, London
• UK Detour: Day 13, London to Ullapool
• UK Detour: Day 14, Ullapool
• UK Detour: Day 15, Ullapool
• UK Detour: Day 16, Ullapool
• France: Day 18, Paris
• France: Day 19, Chartres + Paris