I am by no means a professional photographer, I think the work of the professionals is simply stunning sometimes, and well worth the money it takes, but there is one thing that I think professional photographers would struggle with a lot; knowing when to photograph, and knowing when to experience something.

I wrote about my mishap on Mt. Kumanonagamine yesterday, but while we were in the moment, I was a bit too enamoured with the situation that I simply didn’t do what I had came there to do, film a youtube video. Thankfully I got a blog post out of it, but I failed to capture a lot of it on video, so yeah, now I don’t know what I’m going to do with the footage.

In the back of my head, and what we even said a few times, was that we would come back to do the mountain properly in the autumn when the leaches and mamushi (pit vipers) aren’t as active. So, I wasn’t focused on getting footage at that moment in time.

Rookie mistake. This would have made a great video. I think I also have it in my head to represent the mountains respectively, as they are written on the yamagatayama website, and since I knew we had screwed up, I didn’t want people to follow us and screw up as well. But I guess that’s at the viewer discretion.

I also had it in my head to represent the mountain, not so much me, although yesterday the story about me (us) was so much more interesting, I may have to rethink this policy.

Next time, I’ll remember that my primary goal is to film the mountain, to put the spotlight on the mountain, but also that to be able to do that, I need to keep the viewers entertained, and a personal narrative like yesterday’s probably does a much better job of keeping people interested enough to learn about the mountain. Happy mishaps.