Hunting and Shooting
At this very moment, I’m sitting next to a pond. I’m with my friend Daniel Gossett, affectionately known to his friends as ‘Goose’. We’re sitting in complete silence, a camera in my hand, and a bow and arrow in his.
In my right hand I’m holding my phone writing this blog.
Morning coffee at 10,000ft is perfection.
I didn’t grow up hunting. Since moving to Tennessee, I’ve been exposed to things a Southern California native wouldn’t likely be exposed to. Hunting was one of those things. For starters, I’ve never killed an animal, and until the last year, I’d never even been on a hunt. In fact, I’d say I didn’t look at it in a favorable light. The human race has mostly abandoned that way of living, and with mass production and the industrial age, we have little to no need for it. So growing up, the only “hunting” I was exposed to was evil-doer ads from PETA and those heartbreaking scenes in Disney's Bambie and Fox and the Hound, not to mention Geston proving his manhood by killing “the beast.” For context: watch this video of me following around Goose on our first Elk hunt last year; I volunteered to film him on his first Elk hunting adventure.
Just for the techie side… on our first hunt, we told our story not on cave walls or carvings into bones, but with 2 go pros, a DJI action camera 2, a mini Mavic pro 3, a Sony a6600, Sam and I’s Sony fx3 with a 24-70, and an onboard shotgun Sennheiser 400.
On our current hunt, we had a GoPro, Action Cam 3, the same drone, and the same fx3 setup. Here is a trailer for Goose’s YouTube channel where you’ll see the full journey in the months to come.
Filming while hunting is also a new challenge. It's similar to filming golf I imagine. I stay quiet and I follow his instructions. When we walk through the forest, I try to match my steps with his since I am always behind. I stop when he stops. I have to keep a sharp eye between the tree ahead and on the battery level, the ND filter, and the exposure; hunting the story and the animal.
Wielding a camera around another person's job, hobby, lifestyle, or story opens you up to learning. Not just the lensing of it, but the interaction and fully being present. It was the times when the camera was down that Goose shared with me his vast knowledge of any animal he kills. It was going over to his house to plan our adventure while eating deer or turkey that taught me the only meat his family eats at home is meat they kill. The relationship hunters (perhaps not all) have with their food is profound. I’m not sure I’ll ever do it justice in a blog post. My hope is that through my lens I can tell his story in a non-judgmental way, but also in a way that puts you there next to him and next to all hunters.
As we sit here at this pond and “glass,” (the act of spotting game at a distance from a stationary position with the aid of binoculars or a spotting glass) all I can think about is how generations and civilizations before us also hunted and told their stories.