John Hill (a.k.a. johnhill_3009 or jchwayz )

Welcome to my channel. I've been shooting amateur videos since 1986. Most of my subjects are railroads in and around Minnesota ad the upper Midwest, plus some coverage of airplanes, Mississippi River shipping, and Great Lakes seaports.

My first camcorder was a JVC VHS-C (Compact VHS) camcorder - the same model seen in the original "Back To The Future" movie. Since compact VHS cassettes recorded only 20 minutes instead of the normal 2-hr full size cassettes. I re-recorded all my footage from VHS-C onto cheaper full-size VHS tapes and reused a small number of VHS-C cassettes as intermediate masters. I later regretted purchasing the compact format because of inevitable loss of image quality from the transferring. Still, it was a fun camcorder.

Subsequent camcorder purchases were several Sony 8-mm "Handycam" units, which I used until early in the year 2000. I did little shooting until 2017 when I purchased a new Sony digital camcorder.