Our wildflower garden has finally come into bloom. A warm, unusually still afternoon with soft light beckoned me to the backyard with a macro lens.
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AVLL Softball - Maynard v. Wakefield
July 8, 2008 – 12:13 pm
A Pixel Corps challenge got me out of the house over the holiday weekend looking for some photojournalistic opportunities. The late afternoon light was pretty sweet and I was hoping there would be kids at the skateboard park, but alas it was empty.
Found a softball game in the final few innings and the light was holding — so I took a few shots. It was a close game but, sadly, Maynard lost by a run in the final inning.
A somewhat larger set of photos is in my community gallery: http://community.dmg-photography.com/2008-avll-softball
Maine Media Workshop Video
June 29, 2008 – 8:57 pm
Here is the video I worked on as part of last week’s “Documentary Shorts for the Web” workshop. My co-producer is Barbara Stanifer. This is my edit of the footage. I hope that Barbara will put her version online one of these days — it deals more with the “spiritual” side of woodworking.
Our shooting location was the Center for Furniture Craftsmanship in Rockport, Maine. The Executive Director and Founder of the Center, Peter Korn, was very accomodating to us as we poked around and filmed various activities there for the better part of a day and a half. My edit of that shoot turned into a profile of the Studio Fellowship Program.
Here’s a link to the Studio Fellowship video, posted through Vimeo (I’m not sure the embedded version here is working properly yet — I’m seeing some strange artifacts…)
My thanks to Peter Korn and all the folks at the Center for Furniture Craftsmanship for making this small documentary possible.
Maine Media Workshops
June 29, 2008 – 10:23 am
I just finished a week-long workshop “Documentary Shorts for the Web” at the fabled Maine Media Workshops in Rockport, Maine. The workshop was conducted by John Poole, video producer for NPR and the Washington Post (among others). Only six of the eight participants attended, which was just dandy for the rest of us as the room was pretty crowded as it was.
One week of immersion in the basics of subject selection, planning, filming, reviewing footage, story planning, editing, a little more shooting, editing, more editing, and finally exporting and compression was just what I was looking for. Like all good workshops, the experience puts you in a completely different workflow and demands something in a short amount of time (on Tuesday you think it’ll be a breeze, and by the 3pm Friday deadline you are scrambling to finish something beyond a rough cut).
I had great instructors and classmates with a wide set of talents and backgrounds, so I learned a lot from everybody. Most of the workshops submit their work for a Friday evening screening on the big screen in the Soundstage. Considering we were making shorts destined for a 640×360 pixel window on a browser, they held up pretty darn well on the 50 foot screen.
I want to make a couple tiny tweaks to my edit before letting it loose on the world so I’ll put it in a separate posting. Special thanks to my shooting partner Barbara - we did all of the location work together and then made separate edits of the same footage. It was really neat seeing two separate, yet equally compelling, stories emerge from the same images and words we recorded.
There wasn’t much time for photography, but I took a few “tourist shots” of the workshop and the beautiful surroundings of the Maine coast. Click here for the full gallery (with captions!)
Brain Rules
June 22, 2008 – 7:32 am
I just finished an awesome book - and I mean “awesome” in the traditional sense. The book is Brain Rules by John Medina.
I found the book through the now familiar web of links on the Internet. Garr Reynold’s (from the inspiring Presentation Zen) mentioned it in his blog and pointed to an Authors@Google video on YouTube. I watched the video about four times and purchased the book on Amazon.
I can’t recommend this book highly enough. I’m going to give a copy to my daughter and son-in-law who are expecting their first child in a few months.
For people, like myself, who think of themselves as fact-driven and relatively objective, John’s Brain Rules lay out the known workings of the brain based on peer-reviewed, reproduced science. As John himself says, he’s a great guy but a cranky scientist: evidence is all important, and there’s an entire website devoted to the detailed research references for everything in the book (along with excerpts of the DVD that comes with the book).
From a business perspective I was interested in the book because giving effective presentations is something key to my future income stream and knowing how the brain acquires information and maintains attention is critical information for presenters. For this alone it was worth the price of the book. But, if you do nothing else and take an hour to watch the Google video, you’ll see that there is much, much more to Brain Rules.
(While reading the chapter on attention I suddenly realized that a seemingly nonsequitur joke in his presentation was rather odd — and then I went back to the video looked at the timing and it all made perfect sense!)
Read the book or at least watch the Google Video. Visit his web site. Go, now! Shoo!
River Solstice
June 21, 2008 – 10:24 pm
Musketiquid Arts and OAR have created a bit of a tradition in Concord by having a celebration of the Summer Solstice at sunset, with a picnic and music at the Old Manse followed by a flotilla of boats illuminated with candles (or whatever lights you want), and if conditions permit, you can get totally tribal and enjoy the drum and dance circle.
A full gallery of the 2008 River Solstice event is on the OAR web site.
Shooting in near darkness, from a kayak, is such great fun…
When chimping goes from oo oo to aieee
June 21, 2008 – 9:45 pm
I’ve been dealing with some tendonitis in my elbow the past few weeks and it was pretty sore after paddling down the Concord stretch of the Assabet before the River Solstice event yesterday evening. So, I reluctantly passed on heading over to Westborough to check up on the Osprey nest there.
My “consolation prize” was to sit in the backyard blind and photograph some birds in our little waterfall. Not a bad way to end the day.
Checking some of the initial items I thought I saw something odd when I went to check the exposures, and after a few more frames I started freaking out. As you can see it got pretty wierd. My camera (a Canon 1D MkII) has been a real workhorse for me and so I was really surprised to see it behaving this way. It was a complete mystery to me because it didn’t look like sensor damage or electronics problems.
After Googling around I found someone with the same problem and the diagnosis was shutter blade failure — which, after thinking about it for a few seconds, made perfect sense. The over-exposed “white” lines and the black diagonal stripes, somewhat blurry, appearing in some frames and not others is a good signature for a mechanical failure and short of the mirror getting in the way the shutter is the other mechanical part of the imager.
So, now I get to pay Canon for a shutter that has failed LONG before its expected lifetime. I figure I’m well below the 100K frames shot and the shutter is rated for 200K actuations. At least I don’t have any major shoots scheduled for the next few weeks.
Bathing Beauties
June 20, 2008 – 2:48 pm
By the end of the summer I hope to complete a mini-project playfully entitled “Bathing Beauties”.. Here are a couple of models getting wet..
Little Bit
June 20, 2008 – 1:44 pm
Karen Dodge (Chinquapin Hill Farm) also raises Boxers. Introducing “Little Bit”.
New foals at Chinquapin
June 20, 2008 – 1:41 pm
We visited our friends at Chinquapin Hill Farm in New Hampshire a couple of weeks ago to discuss our latest venture (more on that soon) and took the opportunity to photograph their foals - just a few weeks old.
