My new musical discovery: The aptly named Explosions in the Sky. I’ve only listened to one album so far, The Earth is not a Cold Dead Place. Love it. Epic rock instrumentals.
First Breath After Coma (via YouTube)
This American Life, from a couple of weeks ago: Toxie. It’s an interesting story of a group of reporters who set out to buy a toxic mortage backed security, and then track down its history.
I never really loved the beach when I lived on the east coast. For whatever reason, I like it a lot more now. Wandering the PCH has become one of my most popular ways to spend a bored afternoon. Today I started out for Santa Monica, but ended up at Malibu Lagoon instead. Perfect weather, nice scenery, and lots of activity. It was a good chance to try out the new telephoto lens some more. I still love it. It lets me get in soo much closer to a distant subject. Check out the sea gull, which was taken at 170mm…super sharp (and it is at original sensor resolution, just cropped).
I sat and watched these surfers in front of the sun for a while. I might have lost a bit of my vision in the process, but I really like these:
Check out this well-polished bi-plane:
The seagull:
Lots of dogs (of which this is one):
And a paddle boarder, riding a wave. Love the wetsuit and trucker hat!
Paddle boarding looks like something I want to try. Standing up high above the water and paddling down the coast…looks nice.
While surfing the interwebs tonight, I came across a silly stop-motion video about, well, stop-motion. My first thought was, “That must take freakin’ forever!”. Or does it? How hard is it really? Suddenly, I wanted nothing more than to try my own stop motion animation. I really didn’t want to mess with clay characters, or a plot, or a little set. I just wanted to try moving some letters around. So, here it is below (or view it on flickr):
The first thing I did was start cutting paper letters. Actually, I cut one letter. Then I said to hell with this, and set off trying to find a quicker path to forming words. Scrabble! Perfect. I have a letter set right here.
So I put up the camera, a flash, and pointed it at a black foam board. First lesson: Don’t use a flash, if you can help it. The flash can only cycle so fast, and this limits the rate you can take pictures. I could move things faster than the camera could take photos.
Second lesson: Check your exposure, ON A COMPUTER SCREEN, before you capture the entire scene. I got fooled by the camera LCD into dramatically underexposing. This just meant I had to correct all the shots later.
Third lesson: Set the camera resolution to something lower. You don’t need 12MP images to create a 640×480 video. Everything goes slower with the larger file, so just shrink it down from the beginning.
Fourth lesson: You really do need small movements. My video is jerky as hell. Downright amateurish. I guess I wasn’t patient enough, but I didn’t really have a good feel for how small motions needed to be. Also, I guess I could have made the text a little straighter. And, all of the “letter flying in” frames for the top row failed miserably, because the letters were off the top of the screen.
I cannot imagine doing a full-length stop-motion film, but a few minutes really isn’t that bad. It is strangely satisfying. In fact, I spent a lot more time and got a lot more frustrated with the editing of this clip than I did with the shooting. A lot of that frustration was just figuring out how to do it though, and would go a lot faster on the second try.
iMovie is crap. A pain to use, and it would not let an image in a slideshow have a duration less than 0.3seconds. Further evidence that there is just no reason to use MacOS. I ended up using two things: VirtualDub to piece the still frames together, and Windows Movie Maker for the final editing, adding the end credits, and overlaying audio. It was a somewhat tedious process getting the still images all ready, but virtual dub will quickly take a sequence of numbered JPEGs and combine them to a movie. Irfanview came in very handy for generating these numbered sequence. For example, if I wanted to repeat a frame, say IMG_0527.jpg, I would create copies named IMG_0527_2.jpg, IMG_0527_3.jpg, etc, and then use irfranview to batch rename these into take2_1, take2_2, etc. so that VirtualDub would read them correctly.
The next problem I hit was the sound effects. I used my Blackberry to record the scrabble pieces splashing across a table, and the file was a .amr file format. wtfmate? A little googling, and I found the Moble AMR Converter on free-codecs.com. OK, so now I have a wav file. BUT, Windows Movie Maker won’t allow multiple audio tracks, and I’ve already used the audio track for the music. For this, I had to encode the movie without sound effects (just music), then open that video and add the sound effects in a new project and re-encode the final cut. Easy enough.
Total camera time: ~80 minutes.
Total editing time: ~150 minutes.
Total animation length: ~90 seconds (and the second half isn’t really stop-motion at all, so really ~40 seconds)
Production minutes per animation minute: ~350
That was fun! Now it is quite late, and I should probably get some sleep.
Pandora, for the win, yet again. Regina covers Radiohead: No Surprises
Last week, I got a Nikon 70-300mm VR lens. Tonight when I got home, I found my new Manfrotto 190XPROB tripod and a Manfrotto 222 joystick head waiting at the doorstep. I put the new lens on the tripod, and love how stable and easy to adjust this thing is, it is FAR superior to the cheapo tripod I picked up at REI last year. On the down-side though, the weight is more than doubled (at a little over 5lbs, I think), and I’m not sure I REALLY want to add this thing to an already heavy backpack. In any case, once I got bored of the novelty of slewing the joystick around, the search began for a subject to photograph. After scouring the apartment for random objects, I ended up with these two:
As for the lens: So far I’m giving it two thumbs-up. The VR is noisy. It turns on when you half depress the shutter button, and turns off a while after (to save power, presumably), and it makes a hell of a lot of noise when it “clicks” on. However, I really don’t care, because it does a hell of a job. I can take 1/30th exposure shots at 300mm with reasonable success. It is sharp. Sharper, I think, than the 18-105mm VR kit lens that I got the with the D90. And finally, I’m really happy with the depth-of-field you can get at the long focal length. I guess if you can’t afford an f2.8, just back up and go longer.
A while back I saw some pictures on flickr looking, from above, out over Ventura from the north-west. This evening around sunset I went to check out the overlook spot for myself. The place is called Grant Park (google map), and it has a great view both up and down the coast. My recent reading still has early California at the forefront of my mind, so while I sat on the hill waiting for twilight and watching the constant stream of cars down the 101, I couldn’t help but imagine what it must have looked like to the first person to climb up the hill and look out over the region. Surely someone must have drawn the same view before the Ventura mission turned into a city?
Just for fun:
I just finished the final excerpt from this book. There is a similarly titled book by George H.W. Bush regarding the cold war, but that is of no relevance here. I’m referring the the book subtitled “Firsthand Accounts of California Before the Gold Rush”, compiled by Joshua Paddison.
I’m generally interested in the concept of history, but the usual fare of historical accounts bores the hell out of me most of the time. A big part of this is that most history is told by some unkown-to-me third-party expert, and I have little to no insight into where this expertise comes from and can’t seperate data from interpretation. The vision of events held in so-and-so’s head just isn’t interesting.
“A World Transformed” is a collection of excerpts from the journals and publications of a variety of contemporaries ranging from Spanish missionaries to merchant sailors, to overland American explorers. Most aren’t famous names you’ll ever see anywhere, but just some guy who happened to sail as crew on a merchant ship, or some unknown padre who kept a journal that survived to this day. All-in-all it makes for a readable, interesting account of life on the west coast between 1770, the influx of spanish missions, and 1848, when the gold rush hit the now American territory.
Not news, clearly, since it has become a best seller and has been all over the place, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. I picked this book up in Ventura on the way to the beach because I needed something to read. I finished it the next day. It starts out with an interesting first hand account of growing up in a rural farming village in Malawi in the ’90s, then living through a famine year in 2001, before it gets into the events which really led to the book. This kid, after dropping out of school for lack of money, figured out he could build a windmill out of (mostly) bicycle parts to light his house (and eventually to pump irrigation water for his family’s farm). He learned what little he knew about electricity from library books. Eventually the right people take notice, and he ends up invited to a TED event in Tanzania, where he begins to see a whole new world outside of his village (including his first google search).
