Diffused Light
My teammates and I shot our final project for our film practicum yesterday. We shot it on my 5D MkII and had a great time.
The picture quality out of my Canon 5D MkII never ceases to astound me. Despite its recently being eclipsed by the 5D and the new line of 1Ds, but it still stands as a revolutionary tool in the world of independent filmmaking. The stills below are taken from the footage as it came out of the camera.
We shot late in the afternoon, and between the low angle of the sun and the concurrent diffusion from the tree canopy at the late hour, the lighting we had to work with was absolutely gorgeous. We used no light modification whatsoever, and I love the way it looks.
Whenever I get tired or burned out in image-making, days like yesterday revive my creative spirit and make me very excited to have such a wonderful environment in which to work. It just makes me sad that the projector in our classroom will degrade the footage as much as it always does.
The month so far...
Since getting an iPhone for my birthday last October, I have been amazed by how much more I have been inclined to chronicle things I see every day. Using Instagram continues to be a great incentive to see creatively. I became burned out on photography last year, and have little inclination to lug my DSLR around with me unless I have a definite purpose for carrying it. But my phone is always in my pocket... This month has been marked by used books, new shoes, pretty skies and good food.
Autonomous cars and a lack of margins.
This article was left over on my reading list from yesterday.
At a 2009 technology conference, Brad Templeton of the Electronic Frontier Foundation lectured on the promise of autonomous vehicles; when asked by a member of the audience how a society that didn’t have to pay attention to the world would be affected in its perception and cognitive abilities, he responded: “I don’t think that’s a bug. I think it’s a feature.” After all, he said, we would be freed to read or be otherwise productive in the car. Of course, one might object that there are ways in which paying attention to the world is a “feature” and not a “bug”: surely, for one thing, there are things in the world worth paying attention to. [Link]
I don't have any real thoughts or analysis on this. It simply makes me sad that our culture's non-stop drive to work and make money for its own sake means that Mr. Templeton suggests that people would be "freed to read or be otherwise productive in the car."
If this is the wave of the future, I wish that it might be advertised in a different way. Such as: saying that consumers would be "freed to read or otherwise relax in the car." We tend to always try to squeeze extra work into the unoccupied periphery of our lives. We meed margins!
For myself, this my daily commute represents the only part of the day wherein I can let my mind rest a little bit, so I turn on an audiobook. At home, I try to turn off the computer at least an hour before I go to sleep, just to give my brain some time to relax and settle before I go to sleep. And the funny thing is that my productivity goes up when I allow myself some extra time to decompress.
College Life
I was reminded again today of how nothing is ever as easy as it seems. One would think that, by now, one could write a paper in the well-designed and intuitive interface of Apple's word-processing software Pages and export the finished document to a Word format without irreparable loss.
Not so much. Furthermore, apparently these files are read differently by different computers, even if they all also use Word. I summed up this afternoon's dot-doc foibles in the following Facebook status update.
Write paper in Pages, using required margin and typeface settings: exceed page count. Review paper in Pages: gee that's pretty!
Review paper in Word at same margin and typeface settings: fall short of page count.
Review paper on another computer, in Word, at the same margin and typeface settings: the footnote numbers have now become Roman numerals.
[Bang head against wall]
Sometimes, life imitates The Oatmeal.
Some new entries in the works for tomorrow or the next day. As this is my "train of thought," I have some more stuff to get off my chest about communication.
Full Circle
I love writing. I love expressing thoughts. It's therapeutic. But people have certain expectations of different venues.
Facebook has become a weird mishmash of old school blogging and a twitter/tumblr fusion where people share and reshare whichever photos express mundane emotions to which they have attached too much meaning.
Tumblr and twitter themselves are just too flighty and lacking in feedback. Again, people share and reshare, but there is rarely anything to digest or ponder enough to leave a meaningful comment.
So I've come full circle back to maintaining a blog. I used to have a wordpress site that I used to share photos. But it was dedicated to my professional work, and I haven't been doing enough of it to generate content with the necessary consistency to justify keeping the page open as a marketing tool. It was yet another obligation instead of a pleasure.
This latest page will hopefully last a little longer. I am attaching no commitment to it except to just get thoughts out of my head.