Lazy Saturdays

I'm playing around with www.blogger.com and WordPress this morning trying to figure out how to import videos. It has not been going too well, at least not over at the WordPress site. I can upload the video but I couldn't insert it in the post. I guess it's all a part of learning how things work.


My SD750 broke a day after recording this video. I had it for about eighteen months and it has seen a lot of hard use and hard knocks. I'm undecided about what to get next so James has loaned me an SD600 to use until then.


I was also working on some photos from my Michigan trip and posting those over at www.flickr.com Those should show up on the slideshow at the top of this page.

After I made this video (using iMovie) I decided it needed a music track so I added that before posting it over here on http://www.blogger.com/ I also cranked up the contrast a bit so I think it looks slightly better than the first version.

Working On The Night Moves

There was a full moon the other night so as tired as I was I decided to grab my camera and my lovely assistant to go out and shoot some photos under the light of the full moon. Truth be told, there was probably more ambient light than moonlight but I'll use any excuse to take photos.

The hands down master of night photography is Troy Paiva, who has been doing night photography and light painting in and around abandoned places since 1989. He has also been running the Lost America Website since 1998. Troy has recently published his second book about night photography called Night Vision: The Art of Urban Exploration.

My lovely assistant wanted to know why we had to take the photos at night using a long exposure since we could just as easily take them during the day with short exposures. Uh, because this is way cooler.

We took some photos from the alley side until a big dog came and starting running towards us. We had Louis the furtography dog with us and he likes to pick fights with much bigger dogs. He is basically a smartass and causes all sorts of grief like knocking over equipment and offering lame compositional advice like, "I think you should shoot this from ground level."

"Yeah, well you eat crap off the sidewalk too."

I don't know why we keep inviting him to our photo shoots. I guess it's because he is always hanging around with that look on his face as if to say, "What are WE doing today?"

Anyhow, this is a two minute exposure at 5.6 shot at ISO 400 which I had not intended and explains why it was a bit overexposed and had to be tweaked in post processing. I thought I had checked all that before I left the house.

Nikon Posts D300s Videos from Photographers Robert Bosch & Ami Vitale

Nikon released a slew of new products at the beginning of the month and I am just getting around to looking at some of the online reviews. Most interesting to me is the new Nikon D300s which has video recording. Nikon has released two videos by photographers Robert Bosch and Ami Vitale, titled with the tag "Sur Le Terraine."

You can click on the title of this post to go to the PDN article about the movies.

Not So Lazy Afternoons

The landscape is glowing, gleaming in the golden light of day I ain’t holding nothing back now, I ain’t standing in any body’s way

-Bob Dylan, “Rollin’ And Tumblin’.

Twilight on a river in a shiny new red canoe is not a bad place to be. Not to mention the fact that you often meet some rather interesting products of American culture at various points along the way.

James said let’s go paddling the new canoe after work. OK by me. We loaded up and headed for the lake or so I thought. After it was clear we were heading in the wrong direction to go to the lake I asked, “Where are we going?”

“Oh we are going to the Meremac.”

“OK.”

We crossed the river and I said, “Hey didn’t there used to be a boat ramp on the side of the river we just went past.”

James says, “I don’t know.”

“OK, so are you going to Winter Park?”

“No.”

More driving while I thought about all of the river access points I could remember along the path of the highway. “So are we going to Meremac State Park?”

“No.”

“Where are we going again?”

“To Onondaga.”

“WHAT?”

An hour and a half drive on a Tuesday afternoon to test paddle a canoe seemed a little excessive even for James not to mention the dark clouds that were rolling in as we drove south. We made it down there in good time though with one stop at a very interesting gas station with very interesting people populating the scene. Finally we arrived and even though James had called in advance to arrange for a shuttle driver at this mega canoe rental and campground business the young ladies working in the office acted as though this was their first experience at canoe rental and that was despite the fact that we had brought our own canoe.

We finally hit the water sometime around 5 pm and has a really grand little float trip that lasted about 2-1/2 hours. James brought along a Nikon D-90 in a Pelican case and I brought my Canon A-1 waterproof camera. We took a few photos for the adventurecanoe.com website and I took a bunch of photos of things that caught my eye. We should have been a little more serious about it but we were mostly into enjoying the new boat and seeing what we could do with it. We’ll save the photo shoot for another day and maybe hire some of those local cultural icons we met to act as models.

Another internet success story... Well some sort of success story anyway. I think I might go to the store today and look for a new pocket camera. I now own three broken Canon Powershot cameras of various vintages. If I could afford an iPhone I might just forget about a camera and use the one on the phone instead. I was looking through some old photos yesterday and it is clear that there is a great benefit to having a camera on hand all the time, especially a stealthy little one. Hell, I like playing with cameras at a restaurant while I am waiting for my food to arrive. It's hard to leave the house without one in my pocket. Right now I'm looking at the Fuji Finepics for their wide angle and low light capabilities.

I guess the secret to longevity in compact cameras is to rarely use them like a lot of people I know. We go out and I say, "Where is your new camera?"

"Oh, I left it at home."

Now I know why mine never last as long.

We are supposed to go canoeing this afternoon and that sounds like a pleasant change of pace from working at the office. My neck is killing me again so some time away from the computers and keyboards will probably do me a lot of good. At least I'll be sore in a couple of other places to distract me from the pain in my neck. I'll be taking the Canon A-1 waterproof camera of course and finishing the roll of film I started last week in Michigan.

There is some demolition up the street that I want to get photos of and there is a full moon tomorrow I think so I'll keep my eyes open for some night shots. I still have film in the Sawyer's Nomad that I need to use and get processed.