Awake

A Photographic Field Trip

As soon as 4:30pm came around (i.e. The Magic Hour), I put on a warm jacket, scarf, stuffed some mittens in my pocket, grabbed my camera bag and walked to Lithia Park in hopes of finding a pretty thing or two to photograph with my new digital SLR camera. Upon entering the park, I noticed one of the theatres reflecting in the First Pond. Walking up from there, I squealed with anticipation at the thought of capturing the famous owl perched high in a knot of a tree overlooking the playground. Sure enough, the owl was there and I switched to my 70-300mm lens and zoomed in on the sleeping prowler. A couple walked by wanting to see how the pictures turned out (knowing exactly what I was doing there) and I figured out how to zoom in on the picture to make sure the owl was in focus, and sure enough he was! (No tripod, even!) I was thrilled. It's always fun to share a "local's moment." :)

I did my usual "short walk", past the Parks building to the Lily Pad bridge (well, there weren't any lily pads there at the moment!) and back, experimenting with different light settings and shutter speeds. I love that I can take those pictures of water where the water is blurry but everything else is in focus. I always wondered how that was done. :)

So, the pictures are posted in my Lithia Park set on flickr, starting here. I hope you enjoy them!

Happy Friday!

*Yawn*

Today is one of those pesky season-reminder days that states in a tone of parental sternness, no, it is not Spring yet. Go back to your room. (And stay there, until I say you can come out.) Inevitably, it comes immediately following a lovely day of blue skies and puffy white clouds. Never mind those dark moisture soaked clouds in the distance. (Well, maybe they weren't as far in the distance as I would have liked to have thought). No today is one of those rain and cold induced pseudo-arthritis days where headaches reign and fatigue rules the day. At least for me. At least this day.

The headache is finally moving to the background. And the nap that seemed inevitable five minutes ago now seems less necessary.

(I'm trying to remember the point of this post. Not a good sign for either one of us.)

Had a lovely day with the fam last Saturday, celebrating Seth's 31st birthday, 80s Dance Party style. (Happy Birthday, Tall Brother.) Went *quite* overboard taking pictures on my new DSLR (took over 700) and spent some time earlier this week sifting through them all. Took quite a few pictures in sports action mode and created short little videos (basically fast slideshows as stop-animation sequences) courtesy of QuickTime's "Image Sequence" feature. There are a few pictures left to upload that need red-eye reduction (taken before I found the red-eye reduction feature on the camera), but basically, the lot of them are up on my flickr account in the set Seth's 31st Birthday {80s Dance Party}.

Very happy with the camera. Very. Got a Sony Alpha-300 DSLR with an 18-70mm lens and a 75-300mm telephoto lens. Now I will be in the market for a new hard drive to store all these pictures (at 2.8-3.1 MB per picture, hard drive space is definitely an issue).

Plenty to do lately. Staying busy getting caught up with web projects. Doing lots of reading and crocheting and watching fictitious drama unfold weekly in the form of time traveling island-dwellers, terrorist-thwarting anti-heroes and various other exciting scenarios.

Current playlist:

First Breath After Coma

Artist: Explosions In The Sky

Album: The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place

End of the Road

Artist: Umphrey's McGee

Safety In Numbers

Album: Tabarly (Bande originale du film) Soundtrack

Artist: Yann Tiersen

La Valse Des Montres

Artist: Yann Tiersen

Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain Soundtrack

The Seasons, Op. 37a: VI. June - Barcarole

Performed by: 101 Strings Orchestra

Album: 30 Toddler Classical Songs, Vol. 1

Life In Technicolor

Artist: Coldplay

Album: Viva la Vida

Pas Si Simple

Artist: Yann Tiersen

Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain Soundtrack

La Noyée

Artist: Yann Tiersen

Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain Soundtrack

Soir De Fête

Artist: Yann Tiersen

Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain Soundtrack

La Redécouverte

Artist: Yann Tiersen

Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain Soundtrack

Sur Le Fil

Artist: Yann Tiersen

Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain Soundtrack

Looking forward to seeing Yann Tiersen perform live in Portland in April.

Currently reading: The Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart. Liking it a lot so far. Also reading The Divine Conspiracy by Dallas Willard. About halfway through it, which is great since it took about 2 years to read the first chapter. (Perhaps if you've ever tried to read the first chapter, you'll know what I'm talking about.) I think this would be an excellent book to read with someone and discuss it along the way. Lots of food for thought and discussion. (Actually it's more like 20 years of Thanksgiving feasts-of-thought.) But I could never convince anyone to read it with me. So I'm plowing through it on my own. Just got the Sunlight Print Kit on sale from powells.com. Learning all about cyanotypes and early forms of photography. Waiting for the sun to come out before trying it out. (Necessarily.)

Well, back to the grindstone. Happy Thursday, though the weather defy this statement, I say it again, Happy Thursday. (Sometimes you have to be persistent with happiness when it is gray all around.)

I wanna go outside.

I really do.

Dial-up versions of the "sports-action" videos

For those of you on low-bandwidth connections...here are smaller versions of the videos that I made of the sports-action image sequences I shot with my new camera.

{ Link to original video on my flickr }

{ Link to original video on my flickr }

{ Link to the original video on my flickr }

Hopefully the smaller size makes it possible to view these on a dial-up connection. If not, let me know, and I'll re-create a more optimized version.

(Embedded videos in this post will not be viewable on FB. View this post on my blog to see the videos or use the links provided to Flickr to view the larger-sized videos.)

These videos belong to the set Seth's 31st Birthday {80s Dance Party}

Girls Just Wanna Have Fun

Dropped this image sequence taken in "sports action" mode on my new alpha-300 into QuickTime at 2 frames per second to create this little animation. Sports action image sequencing is the new 12-second silent video for me (that I'd take on my old Konica digital point-and-shoot)...

:-)

Snow?!

Snow falling off the tree
Originally uploaded by amber_is_i

Late last night I kept waking up to these odd swishing and sliding sounds. It sounded like a large group of skateboarders where repeatedly going down Lithia Way, over and over and over again. Perhaps what I really heard was a school of snowboarders swishing in the snow-laden street. Regardless, I woke up a little bleary-eyed from my disturbed slumber to an odd glowing emanating from behind the mini-blinds. It looked to me like a snow glare. Couldn't be. Snow? No way. I separated a section of the blinds with my fingers and what did I see? Well you already know, snow! And lots of it, too. Several inches at least. I was taken aback.

Even if I did listen to the news, the weather forecast only called for "maybe an inch" so I don't think I'm the only one surprised by snow this morning. The forecast calls for rain and snow all week. Just as long as it clears up by Friday so I can drive North weekend after this, I'll be happy.

I really should have done laundry last night. Lugging laundry 2 blocks up hill through the snow doesn't sound that difficult, just a wee bit inconvenient. Sigh.

Happy Friday the 13th.

This and That

The other day I pulled out an unfinished scarf that I had started in the Fall. I had made it too wide, the colors weren't exactly what I wanted, I didn't have enough of one of the colors to finish it, and I thought it was a waste of the good Alpaca yarn to stitch it into something that brought me no joy. I had crocheted a very thin and somewhat coarse sock yarn together with a very soft Alpaca wool (courtesy of an Alpaca named Kirra in Hood River, Oregon) and when I pulled it out, it created a tangled mess. There was no way to keep it from tangling without any help, so I just let it gnarl together and spent over 2 hours untangling it. In the end, I only had to cut and discard a very small length of the Alpaca yarn. I am glad that I salvaged the deliciously soft Alpaca yarn instead of leaving it disconcertingly in an unfinished project. I wonder what I will create with it instead.

I discovered last night that the independent downtown Ashland Varsity Theatre doesn't share its showtimes with anyone except catheatres.com. Not even Google knows what times movies play there! It's true, I should have figured it out long before now. I always thought that it couldn't be the case that both theatres showed the same movies at the same time according to Google. But the power of the Google brand overthrew my intuition and as I arrived to find the Varsity oddly void of people, I just had to ask, "Is Coraline playing here?" The answer was no. Still waylaid by the power of the Google, I pulled out my printout of the Google movie showtimes results ("But it says here...!") and was then informed that they only share their movie showtimes with catheatres.com (and only them). Google, for whatever reason, instead of showing no results for The Varsity, extrapolated the Ashland Street Cinemas' showtime onto The Varsity. (Shakes head and sighs and returns home.)

Meanwhile, while I wait to be in the mood to go to the movie theatre (maybe Thursday I'll be ready), I'm crocheting some little flowers for my beanie hat. I made a beanie just like this for my ex and had tried it on after I finished it and loved the way it felt and fit. (More alpaca yarn...my favorite. We had found it in a yarn shop in Boerne, Texas when I had visited over Thanksgiving.) It's a medium gray, though, and not very girly. So I'm adding some flowers to it so I can wear it and feel girlish and not like a bank robber or a 15-year-old boy. It's amazing what flowers can do for a girl.

Today I finished listening to Donald Miller read his book Blue Like Jazz. I'm glad that I decided to listen instead of read this particular book. It was just the right kind of encouragement served up just the way I needed it. And his living in Portland felt like he was a "friend-of-a-friend" instead of some faceless name. It's not a book for everybody, but today, it was a book for me. Thanks, Don. And, thanks, Jesus.

Man rescued after falling into caldera at Crater Lake

Don't know this guy, but this is the first time I've heard of someone falling into the caldera at Crater Lake. It's also a good cautionary tale...

An Arizona man nearly slid into Crater Lake Saturday afternoon while attempting to retrieve his friend's cell phone, prompting a lengthy rescue by Jackson County Fire District 3 crews.

Kevin Harris, 26, of Glendale, Ariz., was walking along the rim when his friend dropped his cell phone into the caldera. Harris decided to scoot down the snow-covered slope to reclaim the phone.

While climbing down the slope he quickly lost his footing and slid. Somehow he was able to stop his descent, but found the footing too slick to climb back to the rim.

Had he continued to slide he would have dropped off the 700-foot cliff and into the frigid water below.

"That water is close to freezing this time of year," said Jackson County Fire District 3 firefighter Pat Haynes. "He might have lasted a half-hour, probably less if he had gone in."

Crater Lake park rangers managed to throw a rope down to Harris to rescue him until District 3's special operations rescue team arrived.

Full Story: Rescuers save man trapped on Crater Lake ridge (Mail Tribune, February 1, 2009)

Briefly.

Just briefly, a few things I've been looking at over the past few days...

Keeping an eye on the Alaska Volcano Observatory's updates on Mt. Redoubt via Twitter. There is so little daylight up there this time of year, it's hard to remember to check the webcams when it's light out. So the Twitter updates are good to follow.

Regardless of one's social or economical convictions about Wal-Mart, there is a very interesting animated map showing the growth of Wal-Mart over the years. I am loving this type of data visualization. Very creative and communicative.

Haven't been following Ze Frank too closely since The Show ended its run, but I stumbled upon his newest experiment in interaction and social design, a voice-based drawing toy. Looks very difficult and fun. May have to give a try this weekend. An illustrator with the ability to sing would probably go crazy over this.

Again related to Ze, on the site of John August (a screenwriter), is posted a pilot called "The Remnants" that was written and directed by John August and stars Justine Bateman, Michael Cassidy, Ben Falcone, Ze Frank, Ernie Hudson, and Amanda Walsh (with a cameo by one of my favorite actors, Enrico Colantoni). I liked it.

Well that about borders on not-so-brief. So I will bid you a Happy Tuesday and sign out.

Happy Tuesday.

(And I'm out.)