I first encountered the Tooth of Time in 1960 while on a three-day trek on the way to the 1960 Boy Scout Jamboree held at Colorado Springs, Colo. I was a new Eagle Scout and the Philmont experience was amazing.
The "Tooth" is an outcropping on a ridge just above the base camp for boys leaving and coming back from a rigorous hiking experience in the mountains of northeastern New Mexico at Philmont Scout Ranch.
The ranch was originally owned by Waite Phillips. Two of his brothers established the Phillips 66 company and Waite worked for them for a while and he established his own oil business. The first productive oil well for the Phillips 66 company was on the Anna Davis's land allotment near Bartlesville, Okla. Anna Davis was a Delaware Indian. If you are interested in the contemporary stories of Delaware Indians, please look at the book that I did with Rita Kohn. The Amazon link is below. Many Scouts and Scouters will recognize that Order of the Arrow ceremonies in scouting are based on Delware lore.
Phillips generously gave his "Philmont" ranch to the Boy Scouts of America and it is one of the premiere outdoor experiences available to Scouts and Scouters.
Once you have been to Philmont, you want to go back. I have been back several times for adult leader training, once as a Scoutmaster leading boys on a trek, and most recently at the first Philmont photographic workshop held in October, 2011.
Ten of us decided to camp on a meadow opposite the "Tooth" and experiment with photography techniques. Camping was chilly as the temperature dropped to about 20 degrees. My tent-mate was David Carl, who I had not seen since working together as graduate students at Indiana University.
I had anchored my tripod to the ground with a tent stake because winds were brisk. I set up a Canon intervalometer the evening before to begin making pictures at 6 a.m. at an interval of one picture every five seconds. I set my alarm to get up to ensure the system was working.
It was a good thing I checked.
The chilly evening had killed the battery in my 5D. There may have been some expressions of consternation. When I calmed down, I took the battery out of the camera and warmed it in my armpit for a few minutes. The armpit treatment worked and the camera was started about 6:22 a.m.
This project was edited in Final Cut Pro. The camera shot high resolution jpg images which were reduced and mildly sharpened with unsharp mask. I wrote and action to automate the processing of 1,544 files. I certainly didn't want to do that one at a time. The images were brought into Final Cut X with each image set to be one frame of video. There are 30 frames of video to one second of screen time. Each image was made 5 second apart so there is a huge compression of time in this short video. Toward the end of the video I expanded the time of the images where the campers hit the trail to about 3 seconds and put cross-dissolves between them. So this short film represents both a contraction and expansion of time.
Time is the essential element that video controls.
I hope you enjoy the sunrise and I hope you will have the opportunity to leave your footprints on the trails of Philmont.
