mikehedge.com

This year I returned to Burning Man once again. This time, I was part of a special documentary team that my friend and fellow DP Terry Pratt put together. We were invited a week earlier than the event was opened. We shot some great footage of the various artists as they created their projects for the 2011 festival. It was awesome being there with only about 500 people. The playa was very open and empty. After they opened the gates, over 50,000 people arrived, and the Black Rock Desert became Black Rock City! Here’s my set of photos. Once again, during the week of the festival, I was a cinematographer for a documentary, so I only shot a few photos because the whole time, 12-18 hours a day I was shooting with RED998 MX

It was so awesome seeing friends like Scott London, Erica, Clay Haskell, Alexandra Liss, Jesse and The Do Lab team, Lighting who had an awesome art project called Otic Oasis, Lauren Randolph and Diana, Halcyon, Spitfyre and Shimmer, Nick who makes the most awesome Burning Man videos ever, Adam, Matt Scott, and Adrian Belic, it was a crazy beautiful year. So much great art, much of which I got to see being build.

This year, while I was waiting for several hours for media to copy to hard drives, after a long 18 hour day, I decided to walk out on the playa completely naked, not even a camera. It’s super cold at night, so I managed to enjoy several art sculptures that had lots of fire. It was a pretty freeing expereince, inspired by several people who did it in 2008 in our documentary As The Dust.