Movies and Photos on the tiny Lumix DMC-FX50

Since coming back from NABShow in Las Vegas, I have been using my Lumix DMC-FX50 to shoot digital still images. I bought it in May 2007, used it once on a trip to New York City, then shelved it when the pictures I took were disappointed. It just took reading the manual for the camera to produce wonderful images. Unlike the Canon D5 I have been using to shoot models and studio images, the Lumix is tiny and light. I took it a couple of times while walking on the city's Monon Trail and took great pictures of wild flowers. It fit in my back pocket where its weight was hardly perceptible as I walked briskly along the trail. Being able to shoot pictures made the walks that much more pleasant.

Two years ago, too, I shot more video using Lilliputian Sony HD camcorder instead of the more complex Sony HVR-Z1U. A more complex still or video camera is great for manual shoots but for what I shoot currently, a simpler machine works best. I heard this from workshop leaders at NAB Show over and over again. In fact they foresee a time when professional products can be made with what we presently call prosumer hardware as Sony, Panasonic and Canon makes increasingly miniaturized products. The Lumix takes great photos as shown by this sample I took in the garden this morning under under dark, rainy sky.

Photo experts repeated throughout the conference that high resolution is not necessary for good images since the Internet can only display 72-ppi images anyway and the available video technology often just makes high-resolution videos unattractive in high resolution. In fact digital photographers and video makers often use softening, blurring filters to mimic film-based products.

I tested the Lumix movie-making capability this morning. It creates .mov files that were fairly crisp on playback on the Mac. With an Eye-Fi Explore Video Wi-Fi Wireless SDHC memory card, the camera can geo-tag still images and, even more functional, use Wayport Wi-Fi hot spots to upload them to Internet sites and on a Wi-Fi home network, upload to your computer even when the camera is turned off!

Technology is intoxicating! We live truly in amazing times. Industries continue the miniaturization of hardware at breathtaking speed. This camera was made over two years ago.

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Creating "relevance" on social media

Leesa Barnes at one of the workshops I attended at NABShow said that to collect "leads" on social media, your posts have to be "relevant." To be relevant, posts have "to solve a problem." Target a problem, not followers was her shibboleth. If readers find your postings useful, they are more likely to read it, respond or react to it, and the technology becomes the communication and potentially marketing tool it promises to be. If they are not relevant and readers will drop your from their lists. If they find what you are posting filling a need they have they are more likely to read what you post and, as habit forms, will look forward to each post you make.

Collecting followers is not the most effective measure of the successful use of social media. Success depends on the followers you collect, and this in turn depends on why you are on social media in the first place.

Signing up on Twitter revivified my experience in social media. Prior to signing up for the 140-word-limit instant universal posting site, I had signed up for Facebook, MySpace, and Friendster and maintained photo upload sites at Flickr and Picasa but Twitter made me see how amazingly inter-connective the technologies were. Twitter, Facebook and their ilk are not called "social" for nothing. In our rapidly whirling, hurling universe, people are not only anxious to sell what they do well. We are increasingly isolated from each other, even from our domestic partners and children. Each one is busy with her or his own agenda, whether the agenda is work or fun-related. Social Media allow us to connect. Remember E.M. Forster whose motto was "to connect?"

To provide solutions to problems one has to have some expertise in an area. What is my expertise? I am not interested in what I have sold as a product for thirty years in my "old" career. I am all for new things now, New Media, new adventures.

For me, expertise is more than just knowledge or experience about some aspect of human mental, spiritual or bodily activity. It has first of all have to be some aspect of being human that fascinates me, that excites me, that I am prone to spend time and energy on, that challenges me and makes the juices flow. In a word, passion, or, since the word has recently been bandied around so much, that which is near the core of my being, the soul of life, my raison d'etre.

I shall be looking to identify this in the next few weeks. I don't seek followers or "influence" as much as I want to create supports for the energetics of creativity and productivity in my life. I have halfway learned to look inside myself for that excitement that verges on creativity. Company, friendships, loves are welcome but at this stage of life I know the buck stops with me. Notwithstanding I'm still a social creature like ants and bees and emigrating herds of gnus and Canada geese: why not utilize the benefits of community? Social media is community as envisioned by Marshall McLuhan in his famous prediction of the arrival of the "global village." Ethernet community is not the same as flesh-and-blood community. It is better. In some ways, any way.

So, the formula is: Find my passion and delineate within it expertise. From expertise offer what others may be useful or even necessary. Between the two, create.

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Fresh ingredients make healthy meals for body and mind, maybe soul, too

After a week eating hotel food, it's a relief to be back home to my usual fare. Cooking for one has its pros and cons. Sometimes I am too lazy to fix a meal I know will satisfy both my appetites: for maintaining a healthy body and for visual appeal. Thoughtfully prepared food is art. It is easier to eat moderate and healthy meals when they are prepared with a preponderance of fresh ingredients. Canned and other processed foods are lifeless, lacking in that vitality that feeds body and soul. Hot foods warm both heart and stomach. Leftover food come alive again when reheated with fresh ingredients or chilled as a salad.
 
What makes for vitality in our daily routines? Vitality for me is what soul or spirit is to other people. A friend tells me he goes to church on Sundays to feel "refreshed." Going to church starts us with a newly laundered soul for the new week. We stomp our feet and leave yesterday's dust behind. Confession used to serve a similar purpose for Catholics. They unburden themselves of guilt so there is room once again in their hearts to start anew. They will make mistakes again and accumulate flotsam and jetsam in the soul but there is the recourse of cleansing it in the sacrament of renewal.
 
Maybe this is the same impulse in many of us for spring-cleaning. We open the windows, change the bedclothes, put away the heavy winter garments and prepare to live more lightly again, unencumbered with the contemplative penitences of the dark, cold days. Which have their own virtue for allowing us to dig into our souls for what we may have lost from dancing like sprites in spring and summer.
 
Summer for me is fresh vegetables, just as spring is bright flowers. All though the calendar the seasons mark phases our lives mirror. We are infants, then frisky children, ambitious young adults, more easily contented older folks, until we can lay our bodies down gently to go into the night.

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Making HD Obsolete

Back home again in Indiana, spring continues its showy parade. This time I don't seem to have missed much while I was at NAB Show. The tulips are still pretty though they are no longer fat buds but wide-open in the warm sunshine. 81° today was cool compared to 91° in Las Vegas but the body remembers what it left behind when it was flown to the Nevada desert.
 
Glancing over my journal entries in Las Vegas I wonder at how much happened there in my mind. That all now seems like another world away, another time. It's a good thing I have these notes to prod me to remember what I experienced at NAB. The workshops I attended with one exception, the last I attended on how to make web videos "wildly popular", were overwhelmingly informative, powerhouses of practical tips I can apply to my work here.
 
Starting Monday I want to re-assess my use of social media, my blogs and websites. I have done enough exploring. It is time to focus and NAB Show was especially helpful in giving tips on how to do this. The workshop leaders were inspiring, speaking from their own experiences. Digital media has still a long way to go to be on par with film-shot movies but its state is definitely farther ahead from last year. The RED One camera is more firmly established, the resolution of its EPIC 617 now 28K or 28,000 horizontal pixels (compared to 1920 on an HD video camera). Digital video is also more established even as print media are reassessing their monetizing viability on paper vis-a-vis the Internet. Mobile broadcasting has started to show up on mobile devices. The future is exciting!
 
All this should fuel my own home-grown efforts to enter the digital content production industry. We'll see...

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Mobile broadcasting and new media mark NABShow 2009

I spent the last two days in workshops on using social media for marketing and distribution. I don't know if podcasting is going to go mainstream as presenters said it would. Mommycast is an example of one that became so popular they have sponsorship for the rest of the year. Dixie has an annual sponsorship contract with them.

On the other hand, podcast aggregators like iTunes are predicted to start listing videos for pay. Instead of downloading podcasts, viewers can download made-for-web videos, derivatives of larger formats that may even be available for theatrical release. Digital compression has made various formats possible.

The show has been exhilarating. I can hardly wait for the next one!

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Social Media and New Media Workshops at the NAB

Yesterday was social network workshops one after the other. Leesa Barnes (leesabarnes.com) from Toronto led a highly interactive two-hour program in the morning about how to use social sites to generate sales leads. That was an eye-opener for me although I have yet to implement what I learned from the podcast expert. She took her undergraduate degree in history, found herself hired as a project manager because of her organizational skills and didn't look back. She now has established herself as an Internet expert, does phone consultations ("so I don't have to leave home") and "webinars."
 
In the afternoon I attended two workshops by Paul Vogelzang with the PR firm Porter Novelli who with his wife and two other partners launched the highly successful podcast, Mommycast (mommycast.com). The program was the first podcast to obtain the sponsorship of a Fortune 500 company (one report said for $100,000 the first year) and was credited by Warner for 25% of ticket sales for March of the Penguins after Mommycast plugged the movie on their podcast.
 
The last workshop I attended was led by Alex Lindsay, founder of Pixel Corp, who told the audience these were exciting times for digital videomakers. Look at how the equipment and technology have advanced just in the past year. He thinks small consumer and prosumer camcorders will continue to add revolutionary features in the coming year.

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Experiencing, not understanding

In the Spring Issue of Moviemaker, character actor, James Cromwell, is interviewed about his interests. He is a philosopher, someone who attempts to make sense of his life and the world, but in response to whether the ultimate goal was to understand "the meaning of life," Cromwell called understanding the booby prize. "It isn't so much in the understanding, it is in the experiencing," he says.

In the 1980s when I began networking with people outside my career field I took hold of an idea that what people needed was time to take stock of where they are so they can make the proper adjustment in how they live their life to attain their goals and be consistent with their values. The mind has always been where I have felt most comfortable but to live in the mind is like masturbation. We need the courage (for some, this is no courage but just the way they are) to express our inner life with others. Some of us do well in solitude where they hatch their ideas by themselves but most I think create better ideas interacting with others, with other people's ideas. Even in the evolution of species, reproduction involves the mingling of chromosomes from two distinct individuals. One can say that this is the biological imperative for everything we do for love, maybe an imperative that spills over into our need for society and community.

Richard Florida yesterday pronounced his belief that our future depended on our individual and communal creativity. This is based on a society that allows, maybe even encourages individual self-expression. The more diverse the community, the more individual expression becomes honed and polished into brighter, more effective ideas that benefits the whole. In this way of thinking, obstacles like economic depression, bankruptcy, the failure of financial institutions, personal tragedies like illness or loss are necessary ingredients for the hatching of powerful ideas. When we are stopped in our way by circumstance, we either change direction or become stronger in pushing our way through. Both are essential processes in how reality takes shape.

At the super session yesterday with Adobe CEO Shantanu Nerayan I chatted with scott, a wedding videomaker from Denver. He wants to produce nature videos for iTunes but meanwhile he needs wedding gigs to pay his bills. I don't have that stricture. I don't have much money but have enough to live on if I am frugal. But I don't want to live a frugal life if I can't pursue my dreams. Freud 150 years ago was right. It's a balance between immediate and delayed pleasure. Asian philosophies speak about balancing even pleasure itself with the acceptance of the non-pleasurable aspects of being alive. We can't have just what we want. To get what we want is to acknowledge that getting there would mean going where we don't want to go.

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Richard Florida at NABShow 2009

Climbers at Calico Rocks, Las Vegas

NAB CEO, David K. Rehr, as usual gave a dynamic presentation of the accomplishments and future of the trade organization. From being a convention of only broadcast and radio professionals, NABShow now gathers content, technology, and distribution professionals. I came because of the Post Production World Conference but looked forward to the official NABShow opening as I have the past two years I attended.

The keynote speaker this year was New Jersey-born, now Toronto-based Richard Florida (http://www.creativeclass.com) who gave a talk that for me meant much more than Rehr's polished, actor-like presentation. Rich only faltered the last 10 minutes of his 45-minute talk (no teleprompter) about his theories about what he believes is the third major shift in the way we live and work in America. The first was largely based on agriculture and hunting. The second followed the depression of 1870 which resulted in the migration of workers and wealth producers to factories. Now he says factories are best suited to developing, populous countries like India and China. America has to find its new way of sustaining and creating even greater prosperity in the creativity of its people.

Florida cited a study he did correlating greater prosperity with two indices that he called "the Bohemian factor" and "the gay factor." Places where these were high invariably showed greater innovation and an increase in productivity and prosperity. What characterized these populations was openness to and encouragement of individuals expressing their individual selves. He strongly believes (as I do) that diversity in our population especially through immigration was key to continued vibrancy in creativity. He pointed to Silicon Valley where he says an inordinate proportion of the young innovators are foreign-born. Immigration sifts out the complacent and comfortable. Only the persistent and aggressive and strong individuals manage to immigrate from poorer countries into the U.S. It requires ingenuity and invention to make it here. They use the same qualities to sculpt their own lives from the fantasies they fed on before they came, when need and want prodded and pushed them into finding the dream pastures of America.

I have long thought that the greatest potential for America lay in maximizing its wealth of intellectuality. Affluence gives us the luxury of time to relax and dream. Out of dreams come new ideas. Labor costs are so high in this country and I don't see these going down. People's expectations are hard to reverse. We can only go forward by tapping what minds can create, into what we used to call "service" areas but not just the so-called white-collar desk jobs, most of what is left after factories moved overseas, but professionals who think. Entertainment media are the one area where Americans still excel. The motto of NABShow is Imagination. We still lead the world not just in movies and TV but in software development and these industries are driven by creativity.

I had scheduled myself to attend Douglas Spotted Eagle's program on corporate videos. I realized I was going only because I thought I should go. Wedding videos and corporate videos pay the bills for most beginning video content makers but I can't see myself churning these out. I am not rich but I don't have a family to support so a little goes a long way for me. I can get by on what income I have so I don't have to do what I don't enjoy doing anymore. I attended instead a program led by Alex Lindsay of Pixel Corps (http://www.pixelcorps.com/). Unlike Spotted Eagle who works in Sony Vegas and PCs, Lindsay is a Mac hardware and software user. Their presentations are distinguished, I think, by the computer platform they prefer. Spotted Eagle is very organized and throws out a trove of information that he bandies around as if they were facts; Lindsay sprouts creativity. His presentation is not as organized but he inspired me like Florida inspired me this morning. One of his first slides suggested that if you were just starting out shooting video to choose subjects you enjoy, subjects you are passionate about and to create videos you yourself would enjoy watching. Money is important but have fun making it so that in the beginning if you are not earning much money yet at least you'll have fun too getting there.

I was going to Alex's green screen digital backgrounds but decided to attend a workshop on using Adobe's OnLocation. The former excited me more but I needed to know how to use OnLocation for monitoring video shoots. Sometimes we do have to set aside inspiration and go for something useful. And that's the way it goes in life too sometimes.

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Digital video and lighting with Douglas Spotted Eagle

Today my morning and afternoon workshops were all about creating digital video. In the morning, Douglas Spotted Eagle with two other video creators presented an intense program on how to create digital videos. The longer afternoon workshop was all on guerilla shooting with focus on equipment and technique for in-and-out shoots are impossible places like hotel lobbies and mosques. Both sessions were by themselves worth the price for the whole Post Production World Conference. Doug teaches by showing actual equipment and demonstrating techniques in real time. When demonstrating his two favorite mikes, for instance, he demonstrated their indestructibility by hurling them across the hall. The audience as one gasped, especially when he stepped on the lavaliere mike and put his entire weight on the tiny receiver. Seeing the actual equipment and, since I sat at the front table, being able to handle and see how many of them worked was invaluable. Doug didn't shy from declaring his preferences for particular models and his reasons for them. These were not boxed presentations with pretty Keynote slides. I left with lists of equipment model numbers and sources along with in-the-field tips. Workshops like these are comparable, even superior to master classes in piano or vocal performance at a music school!
 
Tomorrow the National Association of Broadcasters Conference officially opens. I shall be at the opening ceremonies and attending Super Sessions with industry leaders the whole day. Tuesday I'll be back at the Post Production workshops, Wednesday I'll be at the exhibits. I want to look at Litepanel products, battery-powered LED daylight-balanced lights for video cameras that have become overnight standards for being green, portable and daylight sources. B&H will also be at the exhibit hall. The last two years they offered NAB special discounts. I'd like to add to my video shoot equipment and maybe some royalty-free HD footages.

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NAB all about consumer-controlled media and social networking

The first half day of the Post Production World Conference was mostly about software bootcamps. I spent three hours with Douglas Spotted Eagle in a video lighting intensive and another three hours with Richard Herrington on producing video podcasts. Herrington believes that podcasts will continue to grow and may explode if iTunes and other aggregate sites decide to offer them for a small fee. He thinks newer TVs will have the built-in capacity to view podcasts. Podcasts do carry an unfounded taint as Mac-only products with its name similarity to the ubiquitous iPods which may be why not more people are creating them. They also require your own hosting site which adds to the cost of launching them. HD podcasts in H.264 are available and comprise the most downloads and subscriptions. The new Flash player has adopted H.264 which could mean that Adobe might adopt the format so that Flash can play on iPod's as well. Herrington claims 100% of teenagers under 21 either own an iPod or intend to buy one making that age segment a large potential market.

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Between attending NAB and shooting desert landscapes

My Delta (née Northwest) flight 297 landed at McCarran at 7:15 Las Vegas time after cruising over stunning desert views that grabbed at the throat with their beauty. We forget the world is a planet but until we see it from a plane, the Grand Canyon a mere serpentine darkness streaking across red and brown desert, snow-dusted mountains, deeply carved rivers highlighted with green. I didn't get my room until eleven yesterday morning. Now if I were a reasonable person I would have left my carryon bag with the bell clerk, rented a car and started shooting while the light was still gentle on the camera sensor but I had to get one task done before moving to the next. Our neuroses follow us into adulthood and I am certain will be there until death!
 
No rooms were available when I first queued at Circus Circus. One reads how tourism is down 20% in Sin City, USA but don't believe what you read. The city and the hotel was as busy as ever. I stood in line a second time and then took almost an hour to get checked in. It took me half an hour to get the elevator right but I did discover that my room was right over the exit to the public parking garage of the hotel. Guests parked free which I think is unusual but then this is Vegas and most people, especially families and large groups, apparently arrive by car, truck, SUV or motor-home.
 
The second task after securing my room was to get my conference pass at the Las Vegas Convention Center. I crossed the street to the Riviera and took the shortcut through their parking garage and the convention center's parking to the convention center. I stopped by the tourist office on the ground floor and chatted with the attendant, an amiable guy called Richard. I followed up on an idea I had when I was last in Vegas to rent a car and drive to the Red Rock National Conservation Area. I had read it was not far. It is actually just 20 miles from the Strip. Valley of Fire, Richard told me, was an even greater treat. I had perused the NAB program after registering. There was so much to do at the convention. If I had not registered for the Post Production Conference I would have been kept busy with everything else going on, the opening speeches, the Content Theater showcasing ground-breaking trends in media, and, of course, the Super Sessions with industry leaders like Shantanu Narayan of Adobe and Bud Albers of Disney, Coraline editor Henry Selick, various film editors, stars and TV personalities. I tussled in my head between the lures of multimedia and photography.
 
On way back to the hotel, I took the long way to procure water from Walgreen a couple of blocks away on the Strip. Across the street from it was Brooks Car Rental. The woman at the hotel car rental counter was renting out her last vehicle when I left the hotel. Carol at Brooks quoted me a price for a similar compact $10 cheaper. She was also nicer. Her accent gave her away. She grew up England but has lived in Vegas twenty years now, loves it and can only tolerate the Old Country for a week before she has to escape it again. Her whole family is here. In fact, her son, Steve, is helping her.
 
I took the plunge and rented a Suzuki automatic. Because I was uncertain about my driving in a strange city I took out extra insurance. The total is $15 more than if I had taken the bus tour from the hotel. I was fighting the Friday afternoon traffic so it took 45 minutes to drive to Red Rock which is just outside the last residential project of Vegas. The view is awesome! I spent the next fours there, discovering as I went how much more there was to see there. The sun became hot after an hour but walking past yuccas and other succulents, the surprisingly varied spring flowers blooming in the desert, was a first-time adventure. I imagined this was how the landscape must have looked to the pioneers to drove out here with their wagons or adventuring single men searching for trouble.
 
I was going to drive out to Valley of Fire this morning but decided I've had enough. I wanted to write. Writing helps me organize my thoughts. I am always surprised to read what I have written in notebooks that are now a sizable pile at home but don't usually read them when I return home. Writing is mostly to facilitate thinking or to release the pressure of thoughts wanting to be recorded. It's like how I used to take pictures, for the sake of taking the pictures, as if by shooting the scene I would always have it to go back to. Writing and photographs are identical in this regard. I wonder if I could transform the neurosis to something useful, even gainful.

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On the way to NAB in Vegas

The Indianapolis International Airport is new. I have not been here before so I allowed extra time to find my way. It is huge. The website promised lots of parking spaces. Not so but I did catch the first shuttle to the airport. Northwest flights were no longer listed as Northwest. I went in anyway to find out all flights are now Delta!

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Gather ye rosebuds while ye may

I hate leaving town in April when spring's cavalcade progresses daily from one blooming extravagance to another, a scene not to be witnessed again for another year. The last three dark, dreary days made today's sunshine that much sweeter. In my neighbor's yard, the crabapple he had planted to replace the dogwood that kept dying year after year is blooming ahead of the other area apple trees. The air is heady with fecund smells.

Chris Isherwood long ago captured my imagination as a writer, a Vedanta disciple (of Swami Prabhavananda) and an openly gay man when most other queers were in the closet. In the 2007 Zeitgeist release, Chris & Don: A Love Story, he jokingly described his writing style to consist of "honesty, that and a few adjectives." His prose is unadorned reportage, like the documentary films that now seem to have come into their own on television if not in-mall theaters. In Goodbye to Berlin (1939), he wrote: "I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking." His self-expurgated diary was the basis for the play, I Am a Camera, and the subsequent musical, Cabaret, that established him firmly on the American literary scene.

On the other hand, the story of his relationship with Don Bachardy is the stuff of the most elaborate fiction. Don was 16 to Chris's 48, a nubile, charming teenager when they met Valentine's Day 1953 on the gay beach in Santa Monica. Isherwood, like E.M. Forster, typified the English upper or middle class homosexual who gravitated towards men from the working class or who were foreign or both. He went to Berlin after his friend, W. H. Auden, in search of boys but being a writer he crafted from his experiences there something more palatable to his readers and the book became iconic of Germany as Nazism was just rising, leading inexorably to the worldwide conflagration whose consequences we still live today.

Chris and Don started making home movies from the start of their relationship and Chris & Don included footage from these making for an immediate and moving diorama of their times and, most affecting to me, how two men age and change (not in the essentials, more in appearance) over the course of 30 years, 50 years for Bachardy. Isherwood died at age 81 in 1986. Bachardy stopped doing anything else the last six months and spent day after day drawing and painting his lover with a brutal honesty that book buyers apparently didn't appreciate. The book of those paintings didn't sell but what an artistic and love-inspired feat! "He would have been proud of me," said Bachardy in the movie. "He would have expected me to be an artist [even as he died] for that's what an artist does and that what I did."

There are not many examples of long-term gay marriages in the public media. The movie is exceptional just in this way. To me however the movie is a stalwart nudge towards realizing what we all know to be true but don't believe will happen to us until maybe, but even then rarely, after the fact: aging and death. How short is a man's life though in the minute-by-minute experience of it life sometimes feels excruciatingly slow.

"Gather ye rosebuds while ye may," Robert Herrick (1591-1674) wrote. "This same flower that smiles today tomorrow will be dying."

The movie also reminded me of my attraction to California landscapes, its architecture that is like that of the Aegean islands but wealthier. Instead of tiny houses on a hillside facing a blue sea, California has huge estates fronting the Pacific Ocean and the Sierra Madre on the other side but in both the predominant color is white under intensely bright sunshine, the basic shapes squares and rectangles. Landscape is such a powerful influence on the imagination. We can dream up science-fiction sceneries and explode cinema in 3-D with breath-stopping special effects but nothing to my mind is more compelling than landscapes as we find it in the world around us. Dreams are fine but in literature it's how well we re-conjure the actual that determines the quality of craftsmanship. In life, too, I suspect the same holds true.

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Rescuing fiction from the 1980s

Between 1980 and 1981 and again between 1990 and 1991 I wrote short stories. I even showed some of  them to a couple of friends, including a Butler English professor who was also trying to organize herself into getting a book on images ready for publication and a priest friend whom I admired greatly. For almost 20 years I believed myself incapable of writing plot and characters. My writing became limited to journals and blogs, philosophical essays about concepts and weighty doctrines. When a few years ago I began thinking of creating videos I immediately chucked the idea of narrative features and focused on documentaries. I do love ideas and love to trace the process of how they come about, the stream of consciousness that produces the delight that is perhaps the reason why we do the things we do.

This morning, unable to go back to sleep, I picked up Jay Quinn's Back Where He Started, the story of a gay man, "married" for 22 years, now on his own again after raising his lover's three children to adulthood. The setting on Emerald Isle, a North Carolina coastal resort island, was one reason I liked the story, and in the 47-year-old protagonist I found similarities to my situation. A year ago last month I took a sabbatical from work that has now become a permanent state. Without realizing it I have transitioned into a period of my life I had dreamed about for years. It came upon me and I didn't notice. Change like this should be announced with fireworks or at least toasted with champagne among family and friends. Not so. Like Sandburg's fog it came "on little cat feet."

What to do with myself now, after the fact? My house is full of books. One can love books without doing anything else than read and continue the pleasure of reading and owning them. But years ago in a past no longer remembered for being so distant I formulated the idea of someday writing. Is the time for this now? Or is the impetus as dated as many of what I once felt important. Life has a way of changing and we don't change with it because the momentum from a past no longer part of our present thoughts carries us forward blindly.

One story is set in Manila when I was still at Santo Tomás. Based on a friendship I had back then, that story today resurrected feelings and memories as though they never left. They had but words can have this geomantic power to transport us to real and imagined places in the past and future no longer now. A second story is set in Jersey City where I lived the first year after I came to America. These two periods are well suited as beginning points to tell maybe a fictionalized history of the terrible, fond years that are now accessible only through images and words. If I do a little more research I think I can come up with other feelings and memories that can serve to start the fire cooking again. I've always loved a feast...

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Vignetting and Post-crop Vignetting in Photoshop

This business of taking photographs is addictive. Instead of doing my Photoshop tutorials this afternoon I experimented with lights and even my tripod, taking the latter down to the floor to take pictures of the flowers I bought for Sunday's gathering with friends. I am a fourth through Chris Orwig's tutorials on lynda.com but already I've learned a ton. I processed this image using what I learned from Chris yesterday about vignetting and post-crop vignetting. Voila!

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Easy Udon Soup Is Not Japanese Food

Writing well is first of all a matter of "show and tell." Instead of narrative, create scenes. Scenes engage the reader and engaging the reader's attention is what you want if you write for others to read.

I knew this.

Tuesday evening, Brandon arrived for dinner bursting with talk. He has not yet found the job he wants and his girlfriend's worry is getting to him. "She's more worried about herself than about me," he said. Approaching 30, she had told him when they first started dating that she saw herself having children at age 28 but she hesitates about marriage because of his current unemployment. "She didn't know me when I was making a lot of money. She only knew me in college when I didn't own a car until my sophomore year and supported myself with a football scholarship and work at the college workout center." Brandon and I discussed his situation. He kept saying, "I know that. I know that."

Feelings take center stage when they appear in consciousness. They push what we know to the wings where they don't even figure in the play at hand. Unfortunately we are often oblivious when feelings take over and we don't see the forest or the trees anymore but just the mist and rain and wind and cold.

Reading Renni Browne and Dave King's 1993 book, Self-Editing for Fiction Writers: How To Edit Yourself into Print, this morning was I-know-that moment after moment.

Narrative is a second-hand report. Narrative describes; scenes make the reader experience what the writer is conveying. A scene takes places in real time. Events are seen as they happen rather than described after the fact. A scene conveys immediacy that grabs the reader's attention. 

I know this from vipassana meditation. When the mind stops wandering and the focus is centered on the ordinarily ignored details of the moment, my perspective changes. From conceptual thinking I switch to experiencing. From remembering and analyzing I notice bodily sensations, cold, touch, movement. The immediacy is compelling.

Another I-know-that: Details, specific items rather than generalizations. Generalization invokes thinking. Specific items recall sensory experience. Taffeta conjures crispness and the silky texture. No wonder that McDonald's patents its product designs. People buy Apple computers because they are not generic like Windows computers made by Dell or Hewlett-Packard. You write that you are using a Macintosh laptop and the image of a streamline, aluminum case with the Apple logo glowing on the cover is as tangible as the touch of the key for F under your left index finger.

Henry James wrote narratives making his novels hard to read. Style has changed. We have been influenced by cinema and television and think in scenes. Writing, photography and videos all involve creating scenes. What moviemakers call cinematic in a novel is a style of writing in scenes, lending itself to "show not tell."

I didn't stay long at McDonald's this morning. I didn't have my MacBook with me. Somehow this morning I could not get the battery to charge. Without a computer to write into, insightful thoughts felt wasted. I didn't want to waste and keep on wasting. I drove to Asia Mart to get Napa cabbage to add to bonito-based soup for supper tonight. (By the way, I learned from Minda's Japanese friend that bonito was just another name for tuna!)

Back home I photographed the items I bought from the store. I brought out the Riffa softbox. It cast very little shadow. Supplementing that with a hard light for the background made a better picture. If I want to take better photographs I need to follow rules. Rules are not God. They do however have basis in experience. Why keep insisting on doing things the half-assed way?

Because the half-assed way takes less time. Am I serious about writing? Then I need to take the time to craft words and sentences. Writing journal entries and blogs are not the same thing.

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Eating is remembering

When I came out of the house at noon to go to lunch, my car was the only left in the parking lot. Everyone else had gone to work or somewhere else they needed to be. I didn't need to be anywhere. I was going to try out a new restaurant, Journey, at Fishers. I had heard about their seafood-rich buffet from Yoichi, Minda's Japanese friend.
 
Going to a new restaurant I have not been to before is like going to one while traveling. I love the feeling of starting over, of seeing the world fresh and new again when I travel. Sunshine seems cleaner and purer then, the sky more blue, the leaves more green.
 
My favorite item on the buffet was a seafood udon soup fresh-made on order from a Mongolian-looking cook behind the counter. He placed the parboiled shrimp, scallop, udon and bok choy and shiitake strips in a copper sieve and cooked them by dipping the sieve into a tall caldron of dashi stock. I am inspired! I have not cooked with shiitake mushrooms in years. Suddenly my mouth longed to hold hot dashi with tender, succulent strips of shiitake for supper!

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Understanding terror on Holy Tuesday, Martes Santo

I was up till 1:00 this morning and woke up at nine. I stayed up to watch Butterfly Effect: Revelations. Before I could watch the main feature I had to endure a dozen or so previews. The DVD from Netflix belonged to the After Dark Horrorfest 2009, lots of gore and mindless stories with no other redeeming value than titillation. I have never understood why people love watching murder and mayhem on theater and TV screens, various psychology theories notwithstanding. There already is so much violence and terrors in our lives.

Okay, maybe not terror. Terror belongs to a group of emotions that zoom us to big mind, to consciousness beyond the trivial that we experience through faceless, indistinguishable days. Like awe, terror is huge. It pushes us to the stratosphere of experience where we fly among clouds and angels, among archangels, principalities and thrones. Is this why people watch horror flicks? They need a taste of heaven even if heaven drips with gore?

I didn't set the alarm. I thought I'd wake up early as I did yesterday and Friday without benefit of an external timekeeper. I slept deeply though fitfully: the blankets were bunched at my feet under the comforter when I woke up. The furnace came on and off through the night, one of the coldest this month that brought snow last Sunday. I felt more rested though than any morning this past week. I have been adjusting my wake time to be at my desk at work on software by nine. My body however wants its Shylock-full eight hours. Finding the most productive way to spend my days is an ongoing project. Life, to be presumptuous about it, is process, process, process...

The sun this morning shares its field of blue sky with a herd of curvaceous clouds. The painterly clouds brought to mind the clouds on the baby-blue altar wall of my hometown Aglipay church. They surrounded the imagen of the town's patroness, Nuestra Señora de la Paz y Buen Viaje, that stood at the main altar. The statue gave her name to our town, La Paz. She had also given its name to several other Spanish settlements around the globe from the capital city of Bolivia to the capital of Baja California in Mexico. The Spaniards must have dreamt of peace while wielding swords and muskets to gain possession of those lands.

Peasants from poor Extremadura sought a better life for themselves and their families. Basque sailors lusted for more seas to conquer. When I was old enough to study Philippine history (from mostly Spanish Augustinian and Dominican friars at their Spanish-era "universidades reales"), I recoiled from the senseless cruelty they must have perpetrated ("perps" they were called in last night's movie) against the hapless natives, my people, but visiting Spain in 2001 I realized conquistadores and the many others who followed in their wake—administrators, parish priests, and hacienderos—were as humblingly human as we are today.

Last night driving home from Bally I heard Tavis Smiley interview the Rwandan-Canadian singer, Corneille (Cornelius Nyungura) on the radio. The 32-year-old singer was born in Germany where his Rwandan parents had gone to college. He grew up back in Rwanda where his father, Émile, became leader of the political party, PSD. Both parents were killed in the genocide of 1994. Corneille managed to flee to Germany with the help of his parents' friend. In 1997 he moved to Montreal to pursue his studies in communications at Concordia College.

Corneille was telling Smiley that for years he told people he had forgiven his parents' killers. He only started to come to grips with the emotions he had buried inside after he married his Portuguese-Canadian wife, Sofia. He told Smiley that the four-year relationship taught him the intricacies of loving someone and in the process he began to feel again. He reclaimed the horrors of his teen years in Rwanda and in this spirit wrote the song, "I'll Never Call You Home Again" in his first English-language CD, The Birth of Cornelius.

Every period of our lives brings its own challenges and opportunities for growth or suppression. I didn't lose my parents violently but it was in my teens that the seemingly monolithic foundation of my family's religious faith began to crumble under me. As a child, I lived for the church's cycle of holy days, foremost among them Advent and Lent. The priest resplendent in lace and silk embroidery presided over moving dramas at the altar accompanied by a choir of women singing soprano and contralto parts. On the main high fest days, the women were joined by tenors Malvar and Tino. The color, drama, and music transported me to another world. They became the seed that later blossomed into my interest in art and classical music, and even my enthrallment with ideas and the world of the intellect.

But transcendence may need to be balanced with earth-rooted authentication. To fly with angels and the asparas of Hindu and Buddhist myths is well and fine, like smoking cannabis must be for many of our youth today. (The use of marijuana among college students recently gained media attention after Olympic star, Michael Phelps, was photographed taking a hit from a water bong.) They loosen the darkness in our lives without our losing them completely. Sun and sunlit clouds may divert and entertain but maybe creativity requires deep drafts from forgotten wells of darkness and terror.

Men and women from all climes and times are imbued with the same emotions I feel so vividly today. The world outside (at least on our tiny planet, Earth) may have changed appearance wherever humans have settled and made their homes but inside we harbor the same ageless demons and angels. History, and the memories that serve us, show how little we have changed. With all the modern conveniences and extravagancies we now enjoy we forget how naked we really are.

Tuesday in Spanish is martes. In the Latin calendar what is now the third day of the week was named after the god of war maybe in recognition that warfare is intrinsic to human nature. As they did in our ancient myths, bright and dark mythic forces fight each other in the field of our consciousness. To see the fight with clarity and compassion and transform them into a personally satisfying life may be what matters in the semana santa of our lives.

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Making the perfect sandwich with a panini press

A grill pan with press cover takes the sandwich the next step higher, a panini! The enameled cast-iron grill pan didn't come with instructions and I couldn't find it on the Cuisinart website either. Trial by error however turned out a taste sensation beyond what I thought it could do.
 
Toasting a slice of bread on the pan produced not only handsomer-looking toast but when filled and covered with another slice and pressed down with the cover, the result is heavenly. I want to quit using superlatives but not today. This sandwich was over the top! I didn't even use cheese slices as one does with a grilled cheese sandwich, that thoroughly American invention. The filling was scrunched down and the three layers were melded together for a wholly captivating new eating experience. A sandwich like this is fit enough for an elegant dinner yet the simplicity of technique as well as the ingredients one can use to make the panini takes gustation to new heights.
 
Unfortunately the images I took of the dish from directly above did not work out. I hand-held the camera and the images were blurred. One of these days I'll take the time to properly learn lighting techniques and take the time to implement what I learn. For now I am still working on the basics of Photoshop CS4 with Chris Orwig. I just finished his video tutorials on the different ways to view downloaded images. These techniques alone radically change how I begin to view, sort and organize my images.

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As near to me as life and death

I stayed up till after one and getting up this morning was hard. I woke up at 6:15 but didn't get out of bed till an hour later. I regret now wasting that time huddled under the covers while the furnace came on again and again to warm the winter-frigid air. Outside light snow was falling.

Yesterday was Palm Sunday in the Christian church calendar. When I was a child, semana santa, Holy Week, was the highlight of my year. My mother faithfully went to the almost daily church services that commemorated the last days of the Savior God. I wonder today if she didn't go out of habit. Her mother, my Lola Tinding, was a religious bulwark in both our family and the small community of La Paz where I grew up. It was inconceivable not to be active in the Iglesia Filipina Independiente with my grandmother's figure looming as large as Lady Liberty does today in American consciousness. Then again I might understand piety and devotion in a different way today.

Some years ago, a Benedictine friend at St. Meinrad Archabbey in Southern Indiana told me he thought Thomas Merton was too "pious." From his tone, piety was not such a good thing. It marked the convert, for instance, and was more emotion than understanding. Tobias was a birthright Catholic, born into one of the German Catholic families in Southern Indiana. His family lived just a few miles from the monastery. Being a Catholic monk, I gathered, was more than sentimentality. The monks at St. Meinrad were most of them educated in one of the country's many distinguished Catholic universities, sometimes with graduate studies abroad, at the Louvain or one of Rome's pontifical colleges. Monasteries were oases of learning during the so-called Dark Ages in Europe. Learning and devotion were twinned virtues.

By the time I left the Philippines for America, my Christian faith was in tatters. It wasn't so much chemistry and biology that I had studied in undergrad Pre-Med nor the life sciences in medical school as my own intellectual questioning of faith that experience did not support. I was well on my way to becoming a humanist. It was another 10 to 15 years before I could acknowledge even to myself that the God I believed in a child couldn't be. I concocted an image of God that was more consistent with my growing knowledge about not just Christianity but the other religions of humanity. In the end I gave up the idea of God as a personal force. There may be intelligence in the universe but it is not the personal god people called on when they didn't like what was happening to them in their lives.

Doffing belief and reliance on God accompanied my evolution into an adult. This is not the typical religious person's journey. Many stay within the fold all their lives. Some even leave it and return as death appears on the horizon and illness reminds them of their vulnerability. I can't see myself going back. The more I learn the more I am persuaded that the universe in which we live is far more mysterious than we can ever dream of comprehending. That sense of incomprehensible vastness is today at the center of my religious life but it more often manifests in such pursuits as writing and photography. Poetry and art are paths if not highways into the ineffable wonder of reality as we experience it. 

Maybe I have simply exchanged one language for another in describing a deeply human characteristic that I sense as both within reach and forever just inches away, forever pursuing me as I pursue it. Maybe at the moment of death I shall see it merge with my consciousness but maybe not. We move on and don't see where we're going from where we stand today.

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Spring brings thunderstorms and rain, and inspiration!

I am getting ready to go out into the rain. Lightning and thunder have stopped and the rain has abated but the sky is still dark with clouds. I am going to feast on crab and seafood at 8 China then come back and write.
 
I read Diane Solway's A Dance against Time yesterday and this morning started French novelist, Yves Navarre's The Little Rogue in Our Flesh. The books are giving me ideas about my writing projects.
 
Last night I watched Peter Greenaway's The Pillowbook (1996) with Vivian Wu and Ewan McGregor. Greenaway wrote, directed and helped edit the movie. It has given me ideas about photography and videos.

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Ada Louise Huxtable's essays on architecture ignites exuberance

Breaking for lunch today I watched last night's Charlie Rose program that included his interview of Ada Louise Huxtable, Pulitzer-Prize-winning architecture critic for the Wall Street Journal (formerly of the New York Times) regarding her book, On Architecture: Collected Reflections on a Century of Change.

Publishers Weekly called her essays "learned analyses, fluent and exuberant." All three apply but it is exuberant that comes to my mind first of all. Watching her respond to Rose's questions and comments (his style, too, especially on this interview, shares the quality of exuberance) re-ignites the flames of artistic exuberance. Words are all too often inadequate to describe the inner experience (and what is not inner experience after all?), even when we take a double take, a triple take, a quadruple... The appreciation of something beautiful is one of our most powerful experiences. So amazing and powerful it surges against the skin and makes us want to share it, broadcast and immortalize it in as many memories as we can. At such a time consciousness is a tangible gift, precious, beyond valuation because amazement runs over the titter of thoughts that mark our little, insecure minds. We aspire to break our own skin and multiply and spread, and multiply and spread.

Listening to Huxtable comes on the heels of doing Chris Orwig's tutorial on Photoshop on Lynda.com earlier today. Orwig describes how a great photographer differs from the amateur. (I won't quibble and accept our present-day meaning of amateur although amateur in its truest sense is much more, a lover of the highest one can aspire to in  art, trade or craft.) I can settle for becoming capable-that may be as far as I can go in photography-but there are shores beyond to aspire to. If we take the trouble to dream, let's dream to reach the impossible. Who knows but those shores could become reachable just swimming a stroke at a time, walking a feeble step at a time.

To talk about beauty sounds presumptuous but we all probably know the experience of encountering something of beauty, of hearing the sirens sing. They lure us not into death but into a land surprisingly not alien to us but that we often don't visit. We don't have the key to open the gates leading there. We know we are there when we are there and the rest is trying not to forget that we were there. No wonder that our sacred mythologies are replete with soaring descriptions of paradise. 

Willis Barnstone in The New Covenant writes, "For the perceptive reader, spirit eludes name, dogma, and even word to reside in the silence of transcendence." Sometimes words do stumble out of our mouths and we hear the music behind them, the silence which is the quieting of our resistance to be transported beyond ourselves. Then melt away the objections to our divine right to beauty, justice, wisdom, to any of these extreme qualities that each of us has known and that in our heart of hearts we know exists in the midst of their absence.

This image is not great but it documents how the day was yesterday when I took the photo on 79th Street on my way home. 

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Early mornings or late nights for the most productive times

For a change I was up at 4:15 this morning and instead of going back to sleep started my day there and then. Nine o'clock and I feel I have already done somethinyybodyg with the day.
 
Memories of early mornings entice and tease me. The early bird gets the worm. I heard that as a child and the adage exerts enormous influence even today. But I also love staying up into the wee hours and I love the deep, comforting quiet. Since quitting work at the clinic I have indulged my love for late nights but don't have much to show for the indulgence. Maybe indulgence can be excessive. I can try something else.
 
One of my favorite morning memories: Waking up the first morning I was in the Philippines with my sisters. April had met Merma, our eldest, and me at the airport. A family friend had an SUV. Danny drove us to Laguna where we had a lavish seafood dinner and stayed at a new Western-style hotel. Jet lag made me wake up at four just as I did this morning. I went outside to the hallway and watched the purple sky turn orange and listened to the cocks crow and church bells ring. I was a child again but with a difference. The sights and sounds that I took for granted as a child now were precious again, new old memories to cherish.
 
This image is from Venice when our plane laid over at the Marco Polo International Airport and Francisco and I decided to take the local bus to Venice. That photos from that trip are the only ones available to me on my laptop.

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We create passion from what we do every day with pleasure and adventure

The other day I read an article about "entrepreneurial passion". To find our ideal work situation we need to identify what we are passionate about that we end up earning a living from activities that we enjoy and that challenge and excite us.
 
I think passion is overused in entrepreneurial literature. We do need to have a clear idea of how we would like to spend our days, recognizing that we need time to enjoy just being alive, while also needing to challenge ourselves to keep growing, earn money, and enjoy our friends and loved ones.
 
Maybe passion does not come all grown-up like Minerva did from Zeus's brow. I am inclined to think we create what we are passionate about from what we enjoy doing AND do regularly. We have energy and time. What we invest our energy in is our passion.

I had deleted my originals of these photos from our cruise trip to Greece and Italy in October 2007. All that remained were what I had imported into Aperture. Just now I learned I could re-export the raw masters out of Aperture so I can work with them in Photoshop! This image was wholly processed in Aperture. Aperture is great for the final touches after I finish more detailed processing in Photoshop which I didn't do this time.

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