David McLain  started his career as a newspaper photographer and eventually worked his way into the pages of National Geographic, shooting seven feature stories as a contributing photographer for the magazine. Then, at the peak of his photography career, he changed direction. McLain decided to become a filmmaker and began learning the art of cinematography. In 2012 he released a five-minute video titled The Calling, an ode to the life of visual storytelling that documented his own epic journey to 73 countries. The widely praised film, shot entirely with a DSLR, served as notice of McLain’s developing talent and underscored the revolution taking place in video technology.

Now McLain has taken the next step in his career with a much more ambitious feature-length documentary called Bounce: How the Ball Taught the World to Play. The fascinating film, based on John Fox’s book The Ball: Discovering the Object of the Game,  examines the deep-seated urge humans all over the globe have to play games with balls, tracing the impulse back to the ancient game of ulama played by Mesoamericans, and even to other species, including bonobos and dolphins.

“I knew it was going to be a lot of work, but it was four-times more than I anticipated,” says McLain, who served as the film’s producer and cinematographer. The director was Jerome Thelia, who joined with McLain 12 years ago to launch a filmmaking company called Merge. The three-year production on Bounce took them from Congolese villages and Scotland’s Orkney Islands, where the peculiar game of Ba'  is played, to Rio de Janeiro, where they filmed soccer-obsessed Brazilians watching last summer’s World Cup.

They finished in time to submit the film to the highly competitive SXSW Film Festival, where it had its world premiere in March. “Of course that’s just huge for us,” says McLain. He and Thelia will be taking the documentary to festivals around the world—“It’s not an American-centric film,” McLain notes—and are looking at international and domestic television deals. Later it will be released on video on demand and streaming services like Netflix.

“During the time we took to make Bounce, the landscape of distribution changed entirely,” he notes. “Like a lot of industries, it’s in a state of transition and flux.”

Flux and transition are realities that photographers and filmmakers are used to; that’s the price of working in art forms that exist within a matrix of technology. McLain has leveraged the force of technological innovation to redefine himself, making the move from photography to motion powered by what he calls “creative stoke.”

“It was new and fun to learn, and the changing technology made it possible,” he says. That’s the positive side of the flux state. But there were other, more practical reasons for his career move. Along with new camera and distribution technologies came upheaval in the print industry as it buckled under the weight of the Internet.

“One day you wake up and realize you can’t make a living as a magazine photographer,” he says.

The Long Learning Curve

McLain, who lives with his wife and two children in a 220-year-old Maine farmhouse, still shoots commercial lifestyle work. Photography has been part of his life since high school in Buffalo, NY, where he was mentored by a local photographer. “There wasn’t a lot of worry about building my self-esteem and saying, ‘Hey, nice try,’” he says. “It was about learning a craft.” At Syracuse University he was the photo editor of the Daily Orange. “While all my friends were doing crappy work-study jobs or waiting tables, I was flying all over the country photographing the Syracuse basketball team,” he says. He also began stringing for wire services.

Then came newspaper work. “When I got out of college, you could go to any town in America and get a job shooting for a newspaper and make a decent, living wage,” he says. “But more important, you could shoot every day and develop your skills.”

Those days, when learning tradecraft through hard-won experience was a defining feature of what it meant to be a professional photographer, have slipped away, McLain says. Because of technology, the dividing line between the professional and the amateur has blurred.

“Once, you needed photographers, like you needed plumbers,” he says. “Now everyone is a photographer. But not everyone is a plumber, which is why plumbers are doing just fine.”

The analogy is truthful, as far as it goes, but craftsmanship still has its place. McLain used what he learned working at newspapers to turn himself into a respected magazine photographer. Today, he says, the question he is most often asked by aspiring photographers is how he did that.

“They want to know how to become a National Geographic photographer, and I tell them that the learning curve in photography has the slowest incline they can imagine,” he says. “You start the curve at year one, and you get where you want to be at year 15. It was that way for me, at least.”

And now he’s working his way along another learning curve. “I don’t think a lot of photographers appreciate the degree to which cinematography is a different kind of work,” he says.

The Nature of Story

At his blog, McLain has elaborated on those differences, which only became clearer to him while shooting Bounce.

“One of the things I learned,” says McLain, “is that photography is not cinematography, and cinematography is not photography. They are related, but as second or third cousins.”

The most fundamental difference between the two mediums is the element of time, or, rather, how one thinks about it. Photographers stop time. Filmmakers don’t.

“When you take a photo, you’re capturing a single moment. But in cinema there are no single moments—there’s always something that comes after the moment you’re seeing,” McLain  says. “Cinematographers are looking to find sequences of time that get strung together into a continuous movement.”

The concept of a before and after in time—which still photography can only imply—has a name: story. And story is the natural, meaningful essence of filmmaking.

“I might shoot a beautiful image, but if it doesn’t fit into a particular hole in the story, it doesn’t matter,” says McLain. “You saw early on when photographers started getting in on motion—no offense, I did it myself—that their work would be a bunch of beautifully composed pictures strung together with gratuitous camera movements: a rack focus going from nowhere to nowhere, or a slider sliding from nowhere to nowhere, or a dolly move going up for no reason.”

Camera movement—another concept alien to photography—is, like everything else in cinematography, subservient to story. “You need to understand the motivation for when a camera pushes in or pulls back and moves from right to left,” McLain says.

Likewise, the cinematographer is subservient to the director, because, says McLain, it’s the director who drives the story: “As a cinematographer, it’s humbling, and you have to check you ego.”

Creative authorship is much clearer in photography, and that’s a powerful attraction for many. For McLain it wasn’t enough. To explain why, he recalls a moment from early in his career, when he was assisting Sports Illustrated photographer Heinz Kluetmeier. “He gave me a piece of advise that’s always stuck with me,” says McLain. “He said, ‘In this business, no matter how far you go, you can never coast.’”