Lately, I have been thinking about the people — especially builders and creators — who have inspired me the most. I realized they are the ones who learned in public and shared their progress openly.
Alex Rivest
I remember seeing Alex in action for the first time at a family friend’s wedding in 2012. He was carrying a giant camera — I think it was Canon 1DX Mark 1 — mounted on a tripod. He would setup his camera at a spot, do something on it, step away to have a chat with someone, return and move it to another spot. He kept doing this the entire wedding. I thought he was the wedding videographer.
Later, when we were introduced, I asked him what he was doing with his camera and he said he was making a time-lapse. He shared a glimpse of it on his camera and asked me to look for more on his website. A time-lapse is where you take a series of still photos and later stitch them into a video. Back then I was just getting into photography as hobby, so I wanted to learn more. The next day, as I was researching, I decided to visit Alex’s website — that day something changed inside me.
Alex was no ordinary photographer — he was finishing his Phd in Neuroscience at MIT. His research was in brain circuitry and was published in Science Magazine. He co-founded a non-profit to build schools in Ghana and Kenya. He made time-lapse video of images from the International Space Station. He ate an apple standing next to a volcano and stepped on lava — this video has 45 million views on YouTube. He travelled the globe and took the simplest yet most inspiring travel videos (sadly, he took most of them down from his Vimeo channel).
I watched and rewatched his videos for weeks, sharing them with my family and friends. And soon after that, I bought my first DSLR camera — a Canon 60D. Just like Alex, I made sure to carry it with me whenever possible and to capture and share as many moments as possible. I even took tons of photos for time-lapses, but never got around to editing them. I really need to finally give that a shot.
P.S. Recently, Alex became a filmmaker — he directed and produced his first documentary, Canary. Here is the link to his interview with FOX News.