We’re leaving on a jet plane, don’t know when we’ll be back again. Well, we’ll be back sometime. With being in the air for around 14 hours, I might actually end up missing a day on the blog — c’est la vie!
Month: May 2013
Kitties and Cameras
Every morning I have to extricate myself from a clowder of cats and this morning they were wanting me to stay in bed with them. I think they can sense that something is up with all our preparations to leave for France on Saturday, because they have been clinging to us a little more the past few days. Another glass got broken this morning, and it ended up looking pretty artsy. We really like the large stemware, but they have a way of making their way to the edges of counters and tables where we tend to brush by and knock them off.
Speaking of France, I have had several inquires about what photo equipment I’m taking to France. The last two photos show the lineup of bodies and lenses, sans my Fuji X-Pro1 which I used to take the photos. The two Canon 1Ds bodies, the 17-40mm ƒ/4 and 70-200mm ƒ/4 zoom lenses, the 50mm ƒ/1.4 and 40mm ƒ/2.8 lenses, plus extra batteries may seem like a lot to carry, but they are not, really. I’ve been carrying one body, either a 5D or a 1Ds, the two zoom lenses, the 50mm lens and an extra battery with me everyday for the past 6 months in my laptop/camera messenger bag (not shown). The last photo shows how the cameras and lenses all fit nicely into my Lowepro Passport Sling Camera bag that I’ve had for a couple of years now. The Lowepro Passport is a compact, yet roomy bag that is really comfortable to carry. The zoom lenses give me a range from super-wide angle to telephoto, and the 50mm gives me a “fast” normal lens. The 40mm lens is a compact lens, and while not a true macro lens, it focuses close enough to allow me to crop to near macro levels, allowing me to leave my much larger 100mm macro lens at home.
Must Ask You To Leave
I had to meet a guy at a call center, and while I was waiting I noticed the Sandias reflecting on the building were nicely cubist, so I snapped a photo. I waited almost 10 minutes after I took the photo for the person I was meeting to show up. Soon after he came out, a security guard came walking up from the other direction and when he got up to where we were standing, he told me “Photographing the building is not allowed. I must ask you to leave!” The person I was meeting with said “Oh! Really? I didn’t know that!” I left right after that, but I find these supposed “no photographing buildings” policies to be very strange — when I looked up the address on Google maps, there was a nice, extremely clear satellite image of the building, and “street view” images of the building. When I got home, I looked up Google Images using the address and found a lot of photographs of the building that were taken on the property, as well. Despite what the guard told me, photographing the building is very much allowed, because there are images of it all over the Internet.
Morning Dust
This is the week we have water in the irrigation ditch, so I went out at 2:30 am and let the water in. I barely got everything watered before it got taken upstream at 8:30 am. When I went out to check on the water at sunrise, the cottonwoods were casting shadows on the dust hanging over the ditch bank, and the backlighting on the dried Brown Eyed Susans and Harry Lauder Walking Stick was quite nice.
Party Bus
We were talking about bus conversions during lunch on Sunday, and the discussion turned to converting double decker buses into RVs. There was a double decker bus converted into a party bus parked on 6th Street on the way home yesterday afternoon.
The Trouble With Bras
The only aisle that is a straight shot from household goods to groceries in Walmart runs right through the bras. For as much as people complain about Walmart, they are good at merchandising, because I have never seen a woman walk past the bras on her way to household or groceries and not stop and at least flip through the large variety of brightly colored, multi-patterned bras hanging on the displays. If she decides to try on a few, and she happens to have a man in tow, he will slowly die of hunger and thirst waiting for his lovely gal to find a bra that fits just right.
Since l was done with the grocery shopping and there was nothing else I needed or wanted to look for, I sat on the wire bench outside the fitting rooms while I waited for Laurie. While fidgeting around trying to get comfortable, I started thinking about how suicide bombers believe they get 72 virgins after they blow themselves to hell. “Hmmm!” I thought to myself, what if they actually got condemned to shopping for bras with their 72 virgins for eternity? Now that would be hell! Think about it, sitting on an uncomfortable bench watching his 72 virgins all lined to get into the fitting room, each with a half a dozen bras in their hands. One by one they would come out and explain to him in detail why each bra didn’t fit quite right — “The cups fit on this one, but the straps dug into the fat! This one bloops out unless I stand up really straight and stick my chest out… this one’s underwire poked me, and this one…” And she’s off to grab another handful of bras to try on. While he’s waiting for his next virgin to give him the run down on the inadequacies of the load of bras she hauled into the fitting room, he has the rather round and tired old lady who’s at the end of her shift that never comes to keep him company. She’s nice enough, but he’s not enjoying fantasizing about what she would look like in her underwear. Another virgin interrupts his fantasy to describe her delicate dilemmas with the colorful display of cups and straps she’s dangling in his face — “This one doesn’t….”
Hey Jude
On my way to class on Friday, the young man with the guitar was sitting alone playing and singing at the to of his lungs, and not very well. As I walked by after class, the blonde with the harmonica had joined him in performing a horrible rendition of “Hey Jude” (to be fair, only the singing was really bad, but not terribly objectionable for some reason). They were so involved in the song they didn’t noticed that I had stopped to photograph them, and they were doing the song so badly, they bordered on performance art. As I continued on my way, the guitarist started singing “nah nah nah nana nah nah…” so off key, and out of compas, that I burst out laughing and laughed all the way back to the office.
I took a load of trash to the dump today. I left early and got up to the entrance I’d always turned into and there were no other cars. “Nice!” I thought to myself. As I drove up to the building to pay, the attendant came out and said “The dump entrance is up the road before the light — this is recycling.” He told me to drive straight ahead and follow the road around. I followed the road through about twenty people eagerly waiting for stuff to recycle — they looked disappointed when I drove on by. I got back out on the main road, drove up toward the light, and found a long line of trucks waiting to get into the landfill. Forty-five minutes later I discovered I was in the line for the scale, but I couldn’t change lanes, so I drove onto the scale, walked up to the window and told the attendant that I didn’t need to be weighed. She said “that’s okay, but the people behind you will be mad when they see you turn the other way!” She asked for my license plate number, my proof of residence in Corrales, and driver’s license, then when I went to give her a $5 bill to pay the $4.75 fee, she told me it was a “free day!” “So that accounts for the long line of trucks them?” I asked. She nodded “Yep!” and told me the line would probably go down to the roundabout by noon. If I’d known it was a “free day” I wouldn’t have gone. I would have preferred to pay $4.75 to dump the trash then spend an extra 45 minutes waiting in line to dump the trash. I took the photo of the Sandias on the way home from the dump.
Coordinated Colors
The coordinated colors of downtown and our birds.
Seeing Spots
This is how was seeing things after working until 1:30 am studying how best to shoot video with my Canon 5d Mark II. I was mostly figuring out how to get good, clear sound without line hiss and filter out as much background noise as possible, to do a video shoot for a client at the office. Even though, I’ve had my 5D for over a year, I had never bothered to learn how to shoot video with it, because I rarely do video. I had read about live view and video in the manual, but never bothered to try video. But now that we needed to reshoot a video session because of technical difficulties with the video camera used to shoot the video on Wednesday, and the videographer is out of the office rest of the week, my camera was it.
Before I started looking into the world of video with the Canon 5D Mark II, I hadn’t realized Canon had revolutionized the world of shooting video with a DSLR camera after they introduced the 5D Mark II around 4 years ago. While I think about the fact the the full-frame sensor (size of a 35mm negative) on the 5D is more than 20 times larger than most point and shoot cameras, the same is true for most video cameras, including video cameras that cost thousands of dollars more than a 5D. So I learned that Hollywood has been using the 5D for major motion pictures and TV shows because of it’s compact size and HD video that can be seamlessly integrated into sequences shot on 35mm film. I also learned that because of the FAT 32 formatting of CF memory cards single files sizes are limited to 4GB, about 12 minutes of HD video or 30 minutes of lower res video. But even the lower res video will cut off by the camera at 29 minutes 59 seconds because of laws in the EU that say any camera that records 30 minute or longer segments cannot be called still picture cameras or DSLRs, but have to be called video cameras instead. So Canon has the 5D cut the recording at 29:59 no matter the file size.
It didn’t take long to get all the video details worked out on the camera, but the sound was another issue, because there is a lot of background noise in the office, and the mics built into the cameras seem to pick up all noises in the office. So I needed to reduce background noise as much as possible. Around midnight, flashlight in hand, I ventured out into the darkness to find my audio equipment stored in the shed at the far end of the property. Twenty minutes later I made it safely back to the house with a tangle of microphones, cords, connectors and adapters in my hands, and spent the next hour doing sound tests between 4 different mics, a half a dozen different cables and half again that many connectors and adapters before I found a microphone/cable/adapter combination that plugged into the camera and produced low noise, high quality sound.
All the trouble was worth it, because the video and audio came out great. The video is of a signer interpreting the reading of the master plan for a deaf culture center. With the fantastic video quality, the reader’s wonderful voice, and having a very handsome signer interpreting the reading, the video might just go viral.
Walk & Ride
Walking, riding, driving and a table waiting to be occupied.
Off Center & Not Even 