Eat at Mom's

All the cool birdies come to Mom's Suet & Seed Bar in beautiful rural Hooftytown PA.

Here's a bunch of titmice titmouses and a curious chickadee on the close cam. The picnic table cam had a better view, IMHO.

Was Santa Good to You?

Besides all the nice goodies I got from the family, I had asked them to chip in on a Pelican case for my production equipment and voila! there it was Christmas morning! I think my Audio department will find a place in this one. My next GI Bill check will go towards one for the Camera department.

Weekend Caption/Photoshop Contest

Got a better caption or photoshop for this pic, found in the Internets by Lil Bro? You could win a coveted Blog Ad on my side bar! If you're lucky, I'll be too busy to blog and you'll keep your ad up for weeks!

Leave a caption or photo link in comments, or Email a pic to me at the address in my profile. If you're sending a large animation, please provide a hot-linkable URL. You need not own a blog to win! I'll advertise your favorite charity, web site, or even your movie's YouTube trailer.


Check out the links in Drinks Ordered for photoshops!

Judging begins Monday Night.

WINNER!

Serr8d of The Cutting Edge wins with:

"Now, I'll be back to pick up the four-wheeler and the rototiller. And don't ask me to borrow a damned thing ever again!"

Other Contests

Support your Local Gunfighter
Family Security Matters
Outside the Beltway
Sonic Frog
V The K
Wizbang

A Very Zombie Holiday

h/t Lil Bro

Merry Christmas to You All!

Do they come in Spanish too?

Weekend Caption/Photoshop Contest

Got a better caption or photoshop for this unsourced pic? You could win a coveted Blog Ad on my side bar! If you're lucky, I'll be too busy to blog and you'll keep your ad up for weeks!

Leave a caption or photo link in comments, or Email a pic to me at the address in my profile. If you're sending a large animation, please provide a hot-linkable URL. You need not own a blog to win! I'll advertise your favorite charity, web site, or even your old jalopy.

DAMMIT!

As Desert Cat points out, I've already used this picture.... so DC wins the blog ad for being so anal attentive to the blog.

Better luck next week!

Weekend Caption/Photoshop Contest

Got a better caption or photoshop for this pic from last year's film school flick? You could win a coveted Blog Ad on my side bar! If you're lucky, I'll be too busy to blog and you'll keep your ad up for weeks!

Leave a caption or photo link in comments, or Email a pic to me at the address in my profile. If you're sending a large animation, please provide a hot-linkable URL. You need not own a blog to win! I'll advertise your favorite charity, web site, or even your movie's YouTube trailer.


Check out the links in Drinks Ordered for photoshops!


Judging begins Monday Night.

WINNER!

BobG of Near the Salty City wins with:

"Let me show you the quick way to dress out that deer."

Other Contests
Support Your Local Gunfighter
Family Security Matters
Outside the Beltway
RT’s Ponderings
V The K
Wizbang

California Grrrls

And for y'all film makers out there, The Making!

h/t to Patrick

The Naked Pueblo

The Professor said No Flash, Just Film, so I'll probably produce an improved, Flash version of this in the New Year, if I have any spare time. I hand in the DVD today.

Curiosity

Almost killed the bear.

h/t to Lil Bro

Finals Week

Besides napping, eating, sleeping, FaceBooking, snoozing, and avoiding doing housework, I've been finishing all the projects that are due at the end of the semester... mostly using fine Apple and Adobe products.

The final out-of-class PhotoShop project was to take an old, damaged 8X10 black & white (or sepia) photo and restore it to pristine B&W, then produce two different colorized versions. I'm glad I put this off for a week or two because the professor taught us the ideal work flow for the job only a few days before it was due. I didn't waste any effort reinventing the wheel and only spent two whole days on it, mostly because I had to select a photo that was so complicated. My Grandmother is the little girl on the far left, I think.














The Multimedia Design I (Flash) final project is an interactive "kiosk" flash featuring video, music, and sound effects. I didn't have any trouble coming up with video, as y'all can probably guess. I picked a subject near and dear to my heart.









Film Animation put me back in touch with the Bolex 16-mm film camera, only this time, it was shoot two frames, move the subject a tad, shoot two frames, move it again, lather, rinse, repeat. I'm still struggling with this beast and I'll probably be elbow-deep in Final Cut Pro and Soundtrack Pro (and maybe a little Flash) all weekend to meet the Monday deadline.

As you can see, it's a South Park parody. The characters were originally drawn in Flash, printed, and cut out into paper dolls. It would have been easier to just animate the whole thing in Flash, but doh! it's a FILM animation class. I'm probably going to replace some fuzzy or missing footage (forgot to bring the backgrounds) with short Flash segments if the professor lets me get away with it. I'll post the final product some time next week and hope Parker and Stone and their lawyers have a good sense of humor.

Old Friends

I got interested in photography as a wee lad when Grandma gave me a book on the subject. It was all theoretical knowledge until high school, when a Journalism class assignment gave me an excuse to borrow Mom's ancient Brownie Hawkeye to make a photo journal of the notable buildings in my home town. After that, Dad lent me his Olympus Pen EE for recreational shooting during school field trips and Explorer Post events. That's when I learned the dangers of the little half-frame camera; it went twice as far on a normal roll of film, but that meant there were twice as many prints to pay for! Goodness, you should see the stack of boring pics I took of the many buildings and monuments at West Point.

Dad lent me the Oly to take with me to USAF tech school, but the limitations of the little camera conflicted with my increased experience and motivation to take better pictures. When I got to Korea 30 years ago (oh, jeez, am I that old?), I bought an Asahi Pentax K1000, flash, and a few lenses for the totally manual camera. If I wasn't a total shutterbug by then, I was in deep now. When I wasn't being a flash pest at flight or squadron social functions, I was haunting the flightline and glide path of the air base with my telephoto mounted. Before long, I got a remote cable and tripod -- years later I found myself chasing a thunderstorm through Bavaria trying to capture some lightning strikes. Korea wasn't very conducive to Big Lightning.

A few Korean tours later, I left the K1000 behind and moved up to the Pentax ME Super, with some automatic features. It served me exceptionally well for a decade until the first digital cameras came out. I still used the Super once in a while, but since then, I burned through an Epson, Panasonic, and a Canon PowerShot (on my 2nd now). The cheapie digitals worked for what I needed -- social snapshots and some occasional scenery.

Looked way up in the closet this week and took notice of the pair of old friends who've been gathering dust for a decade or two. I wonder what's on that roll of film I found in the Super? I've never been a real photographer like Les Jones, DaGoddess, or Robert Langham; just a journeyman snap-shooter who's gravitated to video over the still stuff. Now that I'm (re)learning about lighting and such, wouldn't it be cool to dust off these relics and take some cool pics... without falling for the temptation of getting a high-end Canon or Nikon (which would require me to get gainfully employed)? This pic is actually a screen shot from my Flip video cam because I left my PowerShot up in Phoenix last weekend. Lit by a Lowell "Pepper" 100W movie light as a key; the room light was utterly insufficient as a fill light, but I was too lazy to set up a second stand. Looks like I answered my own question... I'm probably too lazy for film photography again.