Photography

My 2nd Attempt at an iMovie Did Include Babies and Animals

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After our trip to Jayson & Gretchen’s we had a ton of video of Teagan.  I wanted to share it with our family but some of it was long clips with not much action and then we had several clips that were very short.  Lauren’s awesome job of putting together my dad’s 70th birthday video got me to finally try iMovie a week or so ago.  It went so well that I wanted to take the footage we had of Teagan with Jayson’s dog and clip it together.  By doing that I learned that 1, it is pretty fun and cool to do.  2, its a huge time sink.  Thankfully it was only 3 minutes of video i created in the end but i can see even slightly more elaborate videos sucking up my time.  I already want to go back and make a montage video of Teagan’s first year, but I just dont have the time to do that right now.

Maybe i didnt try the software enough but I don’t remember iMovie being that easy a few years ago.  I know Final Cut Express was not very easy and after trying both of them I gave up on video editing for a while.  I am glad I gave it another try.  These video’s wont be my last that I work on!

Rain Day

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Today was a lazy Sunday! Well lazy in the fact that we stayed in, but we did do work. We worked on wedding stuff, as well as household stuff. We were originally going to take some engagement photos with the wedding photographer but due to the weather we all agreed to reschedule. It is now going to be after work on Thursday.

We cooked some ravioli for dinner. I find it kind of funny that the stuff we get at the grocery store down the street that can last for like 30 months in the fridge is almost as good as the stuff we get at the fancy grocery store in Grand Central Market. Of course since it is around the same price we can switch between the two but i still find it sort of amusing.

Security Overkill

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I love reading articles from Bruce Schneier. I have read Secrets & Lies, and I am in the process of reading Beyond Fear on my Kindle now. He explains security and security concepts for computers and in the real world in a fascinating way. He also points out the absurity of some of the security practices that we see today. I love this article he pointed to that I read tonight. This isn’t the first time I have read articles about some of the absurd rules regarding calling in suspicious activity or banning taking of photos. My personal favorite was the news regarding Amtrak Police arresting a contestant in their own photo taking contest! As someone who a) deals with real world security and b) someone who likes taking photos of trains and planes this is really disturbing.

iLife 2009

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I have been using iPhoto as my photo editing and archiving software of choice for several years now, and although it isn’t perfect it is the best that I have found. Earlier this week I got iLife 09 specifically for iPhoto 09. The two main features that got my curiosity peaked is the faces and GPS features. With my iPhone I am capturing the GPS coordinates of all my camera photos so the GPS feature in iPhoto seems cool. I am still a bit gun shy to post GPS coordinates on all my photos to Flickr, but for me to have them and publish to my friends is cool.

The really interesting feature in iPhoto 09 is Faces. That is what is hopefully worth the cost of the software. I have been tagging and labeling my entire photo album for a while. It is always a work in progress. With the Faces function I can label all my photos in one shot. As I write this post I am letting iPhoto scan my library to look for faces. Hopefully it will be easy to label after that.

The one downside I have with iPhoto is that all the photo detail (EXIF) data is not stored in the photo. That means if I export a photo it won’t have any tagged details that I put in iPhoto. Since I am a fan of data portability I don’t like that. Since I have started using iPhoto I keep a copy of all photos I put into iPhoto in a separate folder in case I have problems with my iPhoto files. I am glad I did this since I already have damaged my iPhone DB once and had to restore a several months old version. Without my regular backup I would have been out of luck.

So far the new version of the app looks decent, but I am not so sure if it is worth the cost? Only time will determine that.

Video Conversion Round 2

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I finally put the order in to convert some VHS tapes I have over to DVD. I was so satisfied with the 8mm conversions that I am using the same place. I am also sending in about 400 photo's to be scanned as well. I am really upset at the condition my mom kept these photos. She is now finally keeping them in photo box's after years in baskets near the radiators and open windows in her apartment. Tons of photos have been ruined or damaged by getting wet or really hot. I hope the Home Movie Depot is able to scan everything I sent in. All I can say is thank goodness for Photoshop, or in my case Gimp since I am not paying for Photoshop.

I underestimated the number of photos that my parents actually have. I am at 400 photo's in the one box that I took from my mom. I didn't even get everything out of the box but I figured 400 was a nice round number to start with. There is about 4-5 other box's of photos to go, plus a box of slides. I think I might blow my budget on this project. In the end I think it will be worth it to have everything in digital format. I am also having trouble identifying what I might have already scanned over the past 10 years. I found a bunch of images that I already scanned a few years ago, and I bet a bunch more will be duplicated.

My annal attempt at cataloging everything is paying off to a certain degree. I was able to post a bunch of stuff to Facebook and it is hilarious to see the comments from friends.

On the video side of things I am doing only two VHS tapes in this run. That is because I want the original AVI's of these two tapes, and the HDD I am sending the processing place can only handle about two tapes. I am sending in my sisters sweet sixteen video and my Bar Mitzvah video. The next round of stuff I don't really want or need the original source material so I won't use a hard drive. I will wait until I get this first batch back before I send in the next one. That way I can also spread the expense into another month. This stuff isn't cheap, but this batch is about half the price of the 8mm batch.

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The Wedding

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Yesterday was my cousin’s wedding. Family get togethers are always interesting. This one was fun, but thankfully on the less interesting side. I ended up not drinking since I was taking migraine medicine. I was stupid and didn’t eat lunch since I was waiting for my dad to come pick me up from home. He got tied up in traffic for over an hour and a half and then it took us another hour plus to get from my house to his. That meant it was around 3:30PM by the time I ate anything all day. That is a big no no for me. I took two different migraine medications I have before I started feeling better. Thankfully by the time I was at the wedding I was feeling ok.

My sister didn’t go to the wedding since my nephew was sick all week, and my niece was sick earlier in the week. That meant I thought i was sitting alone at a table with my grandmother. I love her, but she is not always the most fun conversation. I was surprised to find my cousin’s Synde & Wayne sitting with me. Their kids also ended up with us so I was not alone. I had a good time. The food was decent. I looked fantastic in my suit, but I always say I clean up nicely.

I stayed over at my parents house since it was really late by the time we got out of the wedding. As family get togethers go, this was a good one!

This morning my dad took me home, but not before I snagged his old computer that he had in his closet and a bunch of slides and photos my mom had. I am on a project to have all my families photos and slides scanned into the computer. My dad has been slow with scanning the slides so i decided to take them and 2 box’s of photos with me. Once I get back the VHS tapes from the conversion place I will send in the slides and some photos. The computer is my dad’s old one that he stopped using because the video card is messed up. He hasn’t used it since January and I totally forgot he was holding on to it so I could take it and maybe do something with it.

Once I got home I napped for a few hours since sleeping on the air mattress at my parents isn’t the most comfortable place to sleep. At least there was AC!

Dinner With My Parents

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Tonight my parents came over and we had dinner. We ordered in, which is is a change of pace for us. I finally gave my mom her birthday present. We viewed the raw footage from the 8mm film I had converted to DVD. Seeing the reactions from both my parents was well worth the price I paid to have the film converted. I took notes on when most of the clips were taken so I could resequenced them correctly. I had to guess at the order of teh clips when I had them put to DVD. I am glad I paid to get the raw AVI files since I can go back and add a music sound track and sequence the files using iMovie. I demonstrated one of the 22 clips with a music sound track and my mom loved it. The video editing takes time, but the finished product is fantastic.

Today was basically a trip down memory lane. I had been playing with iMovie for a while before my parents came over. I wish I had more reasons to take more pictures or video, since I have fun editing stuff. The only real stuff I take pictures of now are my niece and nephew. I showed my mom some quick slide shows of them on my Apple TV and she loved them also.

My biggest problem is that there is almost no video of me as a kid except for the 8mm video I just put to DVD. Then there is my Bar Mitzvah video that I have a low quality MPEG-1 of. I am having that converted by the same people that did the 8mm videos in the next week or so.

Once I have the finished DVD with some music to it I will give my parents a remastered copy. If I have time I will also put a web friendly version on my flickr page for other family members.

The stroll down memory lane was fun, but I need to get ready for work tomorrow.

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