Flight of Fancy

by Sierra Jenkins

Doug Conaway and his son, Tom, were captured by Sonoma’s beauty several years ago, but it wasn’t the vineyards and oak trees that caught their eye. Rather, the two would steal away to the lush wetlands at the periphery of town to watch herons and egrets delicately balance on one leg and hawks swoop from the trees – fleeting moments the two captured on their video cameras.

“It was our secret – but then we realized no one else was going out there,” said Doug Conaway with a laugh. “It’s cool to just see nature unfolds. It’s a lot more interesting to film birds than people,” Tom said. “It takes you to something else.”

The pair also share in a unique challenge. In 1997, when Tom was just four years old, he was in an accident which injured his C6 spinal cord, leaving him with limited use of his body from the chest down. He was in the Oakland Children’s Hospital for six months and began using a joystick to operate an electric wheel chair when he was five-years-old.

“Life went on,” said his dad. “We had to fit this into our everyday activities.”

When his other two children started getting into sports, Doug started looking for something for Tom to do.

“It’s a father’s job to raise his kids and give them something to do,” he said.

Doug was filming at his oldest son’s football game one day when he abandoned the camera for a moment to take care of something.

“I walked away from the camera and Tom came up to it at full speed,” Doug said. He didn’t need to see the red light was on to know he was being captured on film. “I knew he was recording me because he had this huge smile on his face – ‘I’ve got you dad!’”

“I was just drawn to it the first time I saw it – it was just really cool,” Tom said.

Doug, an electrical contractor in Sonoma for a dozen years, immediately threw himself into the technical challenge of devising a film set-up Tom could work. Sheer persistence has developed the initial idea from a tripod mounted on Tom’s wheelchair.

That initial spark of interest in filming has grown from a passion to closer to an obsession for the two, Tom said. He goes out with his dad once or twice a month in the early morning to film in the wetlands around town, often at the southern end of Ramal Road and by Viansa Winery

We were searching for healing and we found it in the wetlands,” Doug said. “We went there one weekend and never left.”The two would go up to pond at Gundlach Bundschu and watch the various migratory birds, a different species every week. They also observed the fluctuation of water due to water reclamation. They were often filming at the same time and could catch the same flight of a bird from two different angles.

Doug said the hardest part is gaining the trust of the birds to get really close.

“The hardest part is waking up,” Tom said. “I’m like, ‘Have fun dad!’”

Another tip: “Never tell me what the weather’s like.”

Especially if it’s just 30 degrees Fahrenheit outside. Because of his injury, Tom has trouble regulating his body temperature and he piles on heaps of blankets for their early morning forays.

“If you just open up your eyes a bit, you see all this wonderful stuff around Sonoma,” said Doug. The two have strung together clips of the birds with music into a beautiful ode to the wetlands which Doug hopes can be used in local classrooms to incite excitement about the Valley’s waterways and teach something.

When Tom takes his wheelchair in for maintenance, he gets some raised eyebrows.

“The wheelchair vendors go, ‘My God, where did you take this – the swamp?’ I’m like, how did you know?” Doug said. “The passion for it exceeds the practicality of it.”

His new camera set up keeps him a bit more high and dry.

His dad’s first set-up was just a camera on a tripod strapped to Tom’s wheel chair, but because the chair is tilted back a few degrees, the angle of the camera was not level to the ground. To allow Tom to film at any angle, Doug created a helmet mount for the camera. Wearing the helmet, Tom can begin to film a flying object as soon as he sees it.

In his latest set-up, however, Tom is 50 feet from the remote camera he is operating, which works great in the marshy wetlands, ensuring the camera is always level. His dad or a friend perches the camera right at the water’s edge and Tom stakes out in the bushes. The camera doesn’t much bother the birds and because they can put it so close, they don’t need an enormous telephoto lens.

“It’s so invasive, but nobody knows it,” Doug said with a chuckle. “Not only do the birds tolerate it, the people do.”

When Tom filmed a recent awards ceremony, he got some delightfully candid shots because he was so far from the camera, no one had any idea they were under the lens.

Doug doesn’t see why Tom can’t go on to film professionally – considering his set-up is at the cutting edge in many ways. The pair are as interested in the camera equipment as the athletes when they attend big sporting events, and a rotating remote camera they saw at a NASCAR event was actually the inspiration for the most recent camera set-up.

After five years quietly filming out in the wetlands, Doug and Tom recently moved into the limelight at the International Conference on Technology and Disability where Doug presented the filming system he has developed. A major training venue for professionals around the world involved in the field of disability and technology, Doug and Tom were among more than four thousand participants from all fifty states and over thirty countries.

“I was thinking only of my own son, never realizing it could help this whole community,” Doug said. “You think maybe we’ve had some burdens we’ve been dealt and you go to this conference and see the disabilities… The radiance and glow that comes from this – witnessing this.”

As both first-time attendees and presenters, it was overwhelming and exciting. Tom is now corresponding with people in the U.K., the Netherlands, Florida and Virginia.

Ultimately, however, filming out in the wetlands is its own reward.

“I’m so busy, it’s fortunate Tom and I can find this time,” Doug said.