The Amish and a more genuine simplicity

Thirty years ago when I still drove around getting to know the country I stopped by Lancaster County in Pennsylvania to see how the Old Order Amish lived. Solid-color buggies with the color-glow orange caution symbol in the back, men, women, girls and boys all dressed alike in solid blue, gray and purple clothes, small, tidy farms and the lack of modern-day rush and clutter: there was a simplicity that bespoke bygone times of unadulterated joy.

Last night, reading Bob Brooke's The Amish Country for American Traveler ($1 at Half Price Books) reminded me why I was interested in the Amish. I probably would not have survived in an Anabaptist community where one size fit all. That's not what drew me to the Amish. Maybe it's what I've salvaged from growing up in the Philippines. By American standards we were poor in material goods but when I take away the subjective feelings of not fitting in (I didn't fit in back then either) the childhood memories shine with what today I perceive as lost down-to-earth simplicity.

In the 80s I drove around studying the alternative spiritualities that the American tenet of freedom allowed to sprout in tiny, unobtrusive pockets around the country. I discovered yoga and Buddhist meditation. On a trip to Yellow Springs in Ohio to attend a weekend vipassana retreat I met several people who influenced the lifestyle I was shaping. Paul, a psychologist at the Dayton VA, introduced me to the Buddhist center in Barre, Massachusetts where Buddhist practice became established. Buddhism drew me for being an Asian tradition of spirituality but like my attraction to the Amish and the early Christian desert hermits a more powerful draw was the aesthetics of simplicity and of "fewness of desires."

When I undertook a protracted sabbatical last year I was motivated by several factors. Among others I wanted to simplify my life in both its material and process aspects. Instead of chasing after material aggrandizement I wanted to deepen my inner life. How well have I succeeded? Not as well as I wanted. But I am recognizing that life is not so much about reaching the other shore as living each day as it comes. Goals provide us with set patterns when fate does not provide the surprises that energize and renew our spirits. Goals are default behaviors. More vital to a life of inner richness is the openness to what lies beyond goals and desires. To walk through life minimally encumbered with expectations: this is a more genuine simplicity.

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Gourmet Asian Restaurants in Indianapolis: Thai Taste

See the full gallery on posterous

Last night, our Thai friend, Usana, invited us to the Thursday night buffet at Thai Taste on the city's north side. My Chinese friends, Allen and Helen, had been urging me to check this out for many years but last night was the first time I went. I'd been too attached to Chinese food when I do go out to eat.
 
As it happened, Allen and Helen, were there, too, last night. They asked me where I'd been. They had not seen me at the usual restaurant haunts where we often meet. We're Asian buffet aficionados. They told me that the Saturday lunch buffet at The Journey is the place to go on Saturday, better than the dim sum buffet at 8 China Buffet. For Sunday lunch, they go to Mandarin House in Carmel.
 
The spread at Thai Taste was okay and most of the tables were occupied by six o'clock. Service was excellent. I do love Thai food but compared to Chinese food it tends to be a tad more expensive. Not as expensive though as Japanese food which is probably the top of the heap in terms of price, especially Japanese steak houses.
 
Outside the restaurant after the meal, I met a friendly Caucasian guy. The front of his white tee shirt was splattered with chili sauce for which he kept apologizing. He told us he discovered Asian foods when he lived in California years ago. There he had a Vietnamese friend who introduced him to Asian cooking. Thai Taste was his favorite but he also loved Korean food. For Korean he went to a restaurant (Ma Ma's Korean or Bando) on Pendleton Pike and E. Miracle on Allisonville Road.
 
The evening reminded me there is a small group of local people into East Asian food. Our party consisted of three Filipinos, a Thai and a Japanese. Yoichi loved the food. When eM invited him to join us, he was incredulous. He hadn't known there was good Thai food in Indianapolis. He was going to Golden Corral for dinner on the nights he didn't want to cook after work.
 
Maybe I should a food blog since food obviously is high on my value list. I can easily add a food blog to my new Duende Arts site. iMovie does not allow me to group the blogs together into an album page as it does photograph pages. I am still looking for how I can put my text products into the site.

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Images and words together may help us pin down memory

For years I have wanted to write what I remember about this challenging, rich, ever-changing panorama that I call life. Only a handful of novels and nonfiction books on life in the Philippines is available even today. The near vacuum begs for more content!

At our last visit to my parents' old hometown in Iloilo in 2007, my younger sister's daughter scanned photographs from the old family albums and gave us a CD copy of the images. I made my own copies using my Canon camera which are what you'll see when you visit the Family Photos page on the Duende Arts website (still hidden behind the current website).

As we grow older, more of our life appears in the past than in the unforeseeable future but I've had this idea for writing about life in the Philippines as I was growing up for at least two decades now. I remember the heartache I felt when I put together my first photo album in the early 80s. Here were pictures of places and people that no longer figured in my life. I was struck by the ephemeral nature of life. Without looking back, we get the feeling we are going to new places and creating new patterns. Going back we see the handful of themes that repeat like a looping filmstrip. The scenery changes, the characters change, but the energies stay remarkably unchanged. The life we live feels to me so much more fantastic than any fiction work can be!

The first pages of that album comprised photos that I took o f those last days in the Philippines in 1975. I bought a camera to document the upcoming adventure in the New World. I came to America to reinvent myself. I was not concerned about holding on to images of the past. I blamed these for my discontent with life. I was going to push beyond the known into the truly new.

In America, I took candid shots because everyone took pictures. I had no grand plan to use images to redefine personal growth. I discovered the world of photography when I bought my first SLR camera, a Minolta. The Minolta showed me that photographs did not just document memories but hint at something I'd like to think goes beyond the ephemera of our unstudied lives. 

As young adults we approach life purposefully. We are schooled to believe we map where we are going. Six decades into a life I find purpose comically wanting.  When we dig beneath the skin, we are not very different from each other. Perceptions, like clothing, lifestyle, and occupation, mask the underlying sameness with which we all must struggle to make sense of ourselves, and the lives we can live. In the sameness I believe lurks something awesome and grand that we might touch with well-considered words and images. With purpose we can only see so much. What is the world like beyond the designs of purpose and memory? Here is the stuff of creation, of marvelous tales and breath-pausing images.

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Tarragon in Later Summer Dishes

As summer comes to a close, my herb garden on the deck facing the lake morphs into everything I shall miss when the season ends. Tarragon, I discovered today, is wonderful in salads. I didn't even tear the leaves up so when a leaf is included in the mouthful the flavor and aroma stands out, pure gustatory sensation flooding the tongue and mouth.
 
Cauliflower is also underrated but its texture is priceless especially when simply stewed with fresh tomatoes and herbs and a few drops of extra virgin olive oil.

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Blueberry Rice

I have not done much cooking at home this past month. Quality Improvement applied to lifestyles is ongoing as it is in the corporate world. Unlike the Obama administration on the abusive interrogation techniques used on terrorism suspects I must move on. Dukkha (in Buddhist practice, what we feel when we don't have something we want or have something we don't want) eggs us to make karmic changes in how we live our lives.
 
Last night's supper resulted in discovering how blueberries can add not only color but flavor to rice. The inspiration came from a book on Spanish foods featuring a simple recipe for rice cooked with fresh tomatoes and herbs. No sauces, just veggies sautéed in the lightest film of olive oil and cooked rice added to the pan. It's a gentler version of Chinese fried rice, the flavors at once fresher and more refreshing.

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Rethinking model photography in light of the forthcoming new website, and Apple's Snow Leopard upgrade

I have been reviewing my model shoots to see what photo images fit my idea of what to post in the new website. This time I am not going to post all the photos from the shoots that I have processed. The new Duende Arts website will have a specific objective: to post products to begin to move into a money-earning phase of the business of photography, videos and writing.
 
Even more than I felt before I started this review I find myself wanting to hone my image processing skills. The images are considerably better in terms of color correction than the images I have on my current website but now I need to work on making these images of striking quality.
 
As I contemplate reviewing Photoshop techniques for image-processing, I am reminded how I need to work on lighting and exposure techniques again. I also need to resume working on videos while dipping my foot in FCP again.
 
Meanwhile Apple has announced its new system upgrade, Snow Leopard, from Leopard. The slight change in name might reflect Apple's acknowledgement that this upgrade does not bring about major changes in the OS although full support for 64 bit should, once implemented by software developers, make for a significant increase in processing speed for those of us with multi-core computers.
 
I especially look forward to integration with Microsoft's core software so that using Apple's iCal and Address Book I automatically access the comparable data in my Microsoft business software. Apple takes an important step in making Apple software more attractive to business and corporate users!
 
But where's the Blu-Ray support?

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The new Duende Arts website takes shape

This is, so far, how the front page of the new Duende Arts website looks. I want a more modern look to the site. Black is elegant but I want change. I still want simple but not too simple, and not the elegant look many art photographers have on their site. I like a straightforward, simple look. I have learned from launching that first iWeb-created site. Less information, more white space, ease of use, presenting just the information I want visitors to have.

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Greg Redux Reviewing Images from the Shoot with Greg and Jaz

I have been looking at the images I shot of Greg and his girlfriend, Jaz. Since completing the shoot is unlikely now I have decided to process the shoot as I would have done had we finished it. I am pleasantly surprised at how many good shots we were able to take in the uncompleted shoot. This is one of my favorites, with an element of unintended humor. I hope Greg goes farther with his modeling ambition. If he can get over some of his natural qualms he has the potential.
 
You can view the set so far posted here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/karuna71/3840568992/in/set-72157618679412656/

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Change Is Due in My Imaging Activities and Interest

I have not done a model shoot since May when I shot Greg and his girlfriend, Jazmine. He was going to come back and finish the shoot but the shoot was never completed. I have not processed most of the shoot because I was waiting for it to be completed so I could view the shoot as a whole. That is not likely to happen now so little by little I am processing the images from the shoot.

I still think I am not ready to offer photography and video services to the public. I am not happy with the level of expertise that I have acquired from exploring digital imagery the last two years. I think I have come some ways. Certainly, just being able to shoot live models was a major break for me. I still think of the end of 2012 as my business launch year. Meanwhile there is a lot for me to learn. However I have a feeling I'll be making major changes in my work activities by early 2009. I have started working with videos and I love videos even more today than I did when I took that first certification seminar on FCP. 

At lunch yesterday I perused the latest issue of Details. A dozen or more pages came inside the cover before any editorial page appeared. I was not impressed so much with the fashion photographs as I was with how the images were shot and displayed. I came home and started to process some model images, including this from the Greg shoot.

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Our Changing Takes on Maleness and Male Friendships

In the September issue of Details, magazine editor, Daniel Perez, writes about overhearing a guy buying "skinny jeans" as Perez, too, was doing but asking his buddy, "Dude, do these make me look gay?"

Gay has definitely become more commonplace in our vocabulary. If homosexuality is still deemed a sin by the conservative majority, gayness (especially lesbianism) has become equated with cool. Straight guys have even adopted gay mannerisms and straight male lifestyle has slowly feminized as feminine values have grown in stature in the larger community, especially among the hip young.

Last night I watched John Hamburg's I Love You, Man, a comedic treatment of this change in how we view masculinity. There was Will and Grace in 1998, then Queer Eye for the Straight Guy in 2003, then the Judd Apatow phenomenon starting with The 40 Year Old Virgin in 2005. I love You, Man stars two from Apatow's stable, Paul Rudd and Jason Segel (seen together, too, in Forgetting Sarah Marshall). Rudd plays Peter Klaven about whom his new fiancée confides to her three BFFs that she was worried because he had no male best friend. One friend warns her he could become too controlling or too dependent on her if he has no male friend with whom to spend time and energy away from her. Peter shocked consults his younger brother, a gay man, about the fine details of finding a best friend. He was startlingly dismayed at his attempts until Segel, playing Sydney, walks into his open house to sell Lou Ferrigno's Hollywood palace. The two hit it off to the point that Peter's fiancée, Zooey (played by Rashida Jones) becomes jealous. At a Rush concert, the two guys are so caught up in the music and their male bonding that Zooey felt ignored.

The movie is not without a flaw. Some of the acting appears too pat, too (I hate to say it) stereotypical but the behavior of the two new-found friends is not only hilarious but reminiscent of the playfulness that boys have with each other until hormones and sex enter the picture and peer approval controls how they express their affection for their buddies. I think the "new male comedy" invented by Apatow is just right on, including (and maybe, for me, especially) the crude sexuality of the jokes is refreshing. A viewer described the movie as "smarter than most." Comedy often tends to make us like fools again but sometimes under the ribald tomfoolery is a basic and profound wisdom about how societal pendulums swing from side to side, hopefully in time describing a full circle.

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Holliday Park Is a Hidden Natural Gem

Saturday afternoon, hot and muggy as it was, I decided to veer off my way home from Half Price Books on the West Side down Spring Mill Road to check out Holliday Park. I found a trail listing for the park in my $1 copy of hikes in Indiana and had planned to check it out some early morning and take pictures of the river where the trails ended. The park was a favorite decades ago when I would take out-of-town visitors to see the "ruins," a weird collection of walls and columns that at one time spouted water. There was no water on the unusual fountain when I first visited the park in the 1970s. I would enter by the south gate and park close to the ruins. I think I took pictures of the fountain although goodness knows where those pictures are now. I never explored the rest of the park.
 
Saturday there was some kind of gathering of African-American families at the park. I didn't want to intrude into their activities so walked toward the nature center. It was closed. Behind it was a path that led to overgrown wildflowers taller than a man. A trail led out of the sunlit wildflower area into the trees. I didn't expect the trail to be the beginning of a system of trails, sometimes dirt, sometimes stone and concrete, sometimes wood that became stairs up steep hills and down into the White River. I spent more than hours exploring the trails. I was a little leery of being alone in the woods. An evil-minded stranger could easily have mugged me. There were few others on the trail. I asked a young woman who was there with her boyfriend where a trail led. She told me it went under the bridge to the other side of Meridian Street. This was the trail I had intended to check out.
 
Down at the river I saw this other young woman who had loosed her two dogs to play in the shallows. At the other side of Meridian, I chatted with a woman who had brought her two boys there to play barefoot in the mud and water. They were about six and eight years old. While other people were thronging the malls, these people were in the middle of wilderness that looked unlike the city most of us know.
 
I took 233 photos while at the park. Many of them were blurred. I was using my Lumix pocket point-and-shoot, the camera I use most of the time nowadays for being small and light enough to tuck into my back pocket when I went on a walk or hike. The resolution is not great but I've taken more photos with this tiny camera this year than I have with my Canon cameras. To think that I didn't use the camera for over a year after I bought it. I couldn't get the hang of composing on an LCD screen rather than in a viewfinder. Now I love it! I can hold the camera near the ground or above my head. This was what made me fall in love with digital cameras many years ago with my tiny 1 MB Sony. I still mourn losing that camera when someone broke into my office in Broad Ripple. I could tilt that camera for a view of the light that totally changed the picture I was taking. The Lumix does not seem to allow this but its small size makes positioning the camera in versatile ways that makes up for the stability of a tripod.

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Bishop Spong's Reinventing Christianity

A participant in the life and struggles of the Episcopal Church in the U.S.A. for more than a decade, I heard of John Shelby Spong many years ago. I first heard of the controversial former bishop of Newark when the media trumpeted his debunking of the dogma of the Virgin Birth of Jesus. I was caught up in my own struggle with my Christian faith and didn't look up the bishop's views. 

Half Price Books here at Castleton has been my serendipitous source of books. Last week it yielded me a dollar clearance copy of Spong's Why Christianity Must Change Or Die. He was scheduled to retire from the bishop's chair in 2001 so this was in effect a manifesto summing up the 21 years he had spent as bishop (from the Greek, episkopos, from epi 'above' + skopos '-looking') and defining his faith for himself and his flock. In particular, he addressed the book to "my audience of seekers and searchers, to those who are either members of the church alumni association or who still hang onto their Christian identity by the skin of their teeth."

Today if forced to categorize myself between these two groups I would have to say I am a "church alumnus" but perhaps like the bishop himself since this book was published I don't merit even this category. I feel I have moved out completely from the two categories the good bishop addressed in 1998. What I am hanging onto by the skin of my teeth is not Christian identity or even  theistic belief in God but religion itself.

For years the people who have entered my life tell me they are "not religious but spiritual." These are largely educated, worldly sophisticated and materially successful Americans and Europeans whose fundamental stance was profoundly challenged on September 11, 2001 when the U.S. was attacked by Islamic fundamentalists. Islam is still largely a religion of people who like the minority but vocal Christian fundamentalists cling to outdated notions about God and religion in the face of scientific and technological discoveries they nonchalantly use daily without seeing their incompatibility with what they believe.

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The Annual Rediscovery of Summer

I was walking to the car intent only on getting out of the heat again when I saw my neighbor, Kelley, leisurely watering and deadheading his border. We exchanged pleasantries and the topic quickly devolved into the hot, humid weather.
 
"I love it!" Kelley said.
 
"This heat, this humidity? Even walking is a struggle!"
 
"When it's summer I want to feel summer," Kelley explained.
 
In the evening, he sits on his deck looking out on the lake. "Maybe I won't enjoy it as much if a pleasant breeze did not blow in from the lake. I've seen owls flying by with their prey in their beaks. One time I saw a hawk fly so low I felt the air stirred by its wings."
 
After saying goodbye, I hurried on into the refuge of my air-conditioned car. Kelley's words kept echoing in my head. He's right. We should be so lucky. Our senses are intact and we can feel life on our skin, our eyes, and our ears, an ever-changing cornucopia of sensations we take so for granted.
 
Kelley's words finally hit me today. I stopped at the community beach when I saw this pontoon boat moored in the lake. Oceans and seas are what I dream about when I think of water but this tiny bucket of water, this little backyard lake, is as pleasant to the senses, and imminently here now.
 
Some people have the natural knack for enjoying the physical world. They glory in their bodies. Some of us, like me, spend our lives in our minds. There is no dichotomy here but shouldn't I enjoy the body, too, as I enjoy the mind? Summer gives precedence to bodily experience. The sun, the heat, the scarce and precious breeze, the laboring breath as we walk briskly through soupy air: instead of fighting off the sensations we can glory in it.
 
Five times a day Muslim imams invite other Muslims to acknowledge the glory of the one God. God is all this, and heaven, too.

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Michigan Summer Paradise of the Senses

Still and video photography are coming together in the same device. Witness the amazing Canon EOS 5D Mark II and Nikon D5000. But for older camcorder owners like me, the old truism prevails. Forget taking a good still photograph on a video camcorder! Today I scrounged around for the USB cable for my Sony HDV HC7 to download the accumulated images I've recently taken with the camera when it was the only camera I had to take still photos. Processing these on Photoshop also showed the limitations of the camcorder for taking still images. Nonetheless, I would not have had even these images if the camcorder didn't have a still photo option!
 
Michigan in the summer is my closest heaven. I love the sound of crashing waves, the fine-sand beaches that seem to stretch forever, and dunes to climb, feet sinking into warm sand that turn surprisingly cold as the feet sink under the sun-warmed surface. Michigan is sensory paradise for someone who grew up on islands surrounded by the wildly blue Pacific.

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This Morning's Practice

This morning’s practice involved additional readings from Meditations from the Tantras, a collection of essays centered around the teachings of the Dashnami sannyasin, Swami Satyananda Saraswati. Preceding the core of the book, a collection of specific meditation techniques taught by the swami, were essays introducing the teachings at the Bihar School of Yoga that he founded in 1964. Satyananda was a student of Sivananda whose books I have enjoyed through the years. This book on tantric meditations is  more recent than Sivananda's books although it was published in 1983. Its teachings are decidedly more ecumenical, including in its broad statements about the efficacy of technique all the major religious traditions of mind-cultivating practices like Christian mysticism and Zen.

My practice is largely founded on the Theravadin scriptural and oral traditions. The bulk of my study has focused on the various Buddhist schools in Asia, and more recently, the translations and commentaries by European and American scholars. My work in yoga has been largely based on Patanjali's synthesis and teachings from Thakor Patel, a disciple of Shri Kripalvanandji. Satyananda's book blurs the distinction between Buddhist and Yogic teachings. The book proposes an end goal of practice not dissimilar from what Buddhism teaches: the elimination of ignorance. Ignorance, as also taught in Buddhism, is ignorance of who or what we are and the profound ramifications this has on how we perceive and live life.

In describing "the experience of dhyana," Satyananda waxes poetical: "Life becomes so joyful so that it needs no ambition, no justification, no reason: it is sufficient just to be."

Manuals of style recommend that the writer avoid hyperbole. To make statements of exaggerated truth makes the whole work suspect. Ordinary life is imminently ordinary. Only in poetry is hyperbolic sweetness condoned. Perhaps only in poetry and in what to me is a similar state, the experience of the sacred, do our minds shift from immersion in the ordinary to be torn free to experience a fuller, more vivid reality unhindered by rationality and intellectuality. Bach's music is intellectually mathematical and perfect but its real impact comes when we forget the architectural construction of the pieces and lose ourselves in the music itself. Living the music is a different function of mind. Dhyana is understood as approaching the limits of mind itself. When consciousness breaks out of the confinement of mind, subject and object become identical. In that union is unlimited space and time, both aspects of experience dissolving into the simplest terms.

I remember a Japanese Zen monk at Barre when I was there to study the elements of Pali. The monk was not in his robes but had not yet given them up. He was seeking a way to return the robes, gifts of a community he was no longer in touch with. He described why he was not sure he wanted to pursue the practice. In his meditation practice, he felt he was losing himself and that was sheer terror. 

The majesty of freedom is an amalgamation of all the possible emotions a human being experiences. Like flour, yeast, salt and water, they unite into a common substance, dough, although this metaphor too is flawed. Substance exists when there is someone outside substance that apprehends it. The agent that apprehends is what we refer to in ordinary, unenlightened life as "I". The concept is so ubiquitous that we don't see "I" anymore. We become absorbed in the delusion. This is ordinarily what we call being practical.

Satyananda writes that someone who touches and lives in the nameless still operates in the world of forms. There just is no longer identification with the forms. The forms, whether self or other, are shapes of eternity passing like the shadows of numberless days, numberless years, centuries and aeons beyond count.

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The Season's Highlight Surprise

I came out to water the plants on the deck this morning and found that the endive has sprung a handful of flowers. Yesterday's one bloom had shriveled up. The flowers apparently live just a day. Dozens of buds continue to sprout on what now appears to be an extended flower stalk for the normally low-growing endive. Its surprise flowers are certainly among this season's most pleasant discoveries!

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Endive's Surprise Purple Flower

Lighting and the unusual make for interesting photography. This morning while watering the plants on the deck in anticipation of another sweltering summer day, I discovered that the endive that had grown an unusual foot-long growth from which extended strange appendages was actually blooming. This was the first of the buds to bloom. A discovery like this is one of gardening's chief pleasures, and coincidentally, photography's as well.
 
I do want to resume doing tutorials in both Photoshop and the craft of taking photographs. I feel I've rested long enough and need additional processing skills to advance my photography work.

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Holland on My Mind

We're driving back to Indiana today and I'm ready to be back home again but the trip here to Holland and Western Michigan has been wonderful! I love the sound of waves on the lake and the landscape of cascading froth rushing and crashing on miles of smooth, sandy beaches. For two nights I indulged myself on 12-ounce prime rib, something I rarely have back home. Here at Spectators on the outskirts of Saugatuck, prime rib is at its best. Is it just memory perhaps that makes anything delectable, something we would travel miles to experience again?
 
After visiting the Dutch sites in Holland, we drove down to Saugatuck where we spent the bulk of the day. Brock was delirious with happiness as he played at the children's area at Butler. He went back for seconds after lunch at Pumpernickel. Later we drove to Wave Crest where Linda bought plants for the shady hillside leading to the lake at her new/old home in Carthage. I bought a Japanese evergreen for the empty spot on shaded border for $25. Wave Crest has some of the most unusual plants but they apparently relocated their exotic birds to Grand Rapids eight years ago. One of the gardeners was incredulous when I asked her about the birds. She can't believe I hadn't been there in at least eight years.
 
It was fun revisiting sites in the area I had not visited in ten to fifteen years. We drove out to Crane Farms and found ourselves in the You-Pick-It area where I bought a dozen plump peaches newly picked from the trees surrounding us. I sampled the fruit before buying the lot. It tasted of Michigan water, air and sky!

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Capturing video on iMovie

For some reason, iMovie keeps reporting an error when I capture from tape with stabilization analysis. I end up having to manually stabilize as much as 3/4 of the capture. Still the feature has been incredibly useful for my handheld shots. At the Japanese festival yesterday, eM took over the camcorder. She is good with chatting people up while shooting them and their kids. The footage is very shaky. It reminds me of what I used to shoot before I got more careful to hold the camera really steady. It's hard to do with a small camcorder but small has meant I shoot more footage. Using the large, heavy camcorder I seldom took it out to shoot. It works best for studio shoots.
 
August was the month I decided I would switch to capturing and editing video on FCP. I had not banked on FC Suite getting upgraded but that actually worked well. I have not yet started using FCP. I need to do the Lynda tutorial for the FCS3 but will need to do the essential FCP7 tutorials as well. It's been so long since I've used FCP. And I never used Motion or Color. The task is daunting but I can't let that discourage me.

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Japanese Summer Festival

I just got back from attending the Japanese summer festival with Minda, Luz and Yoichi. We had a good time. Minda (who likes to be called eM) shot some footage. I can hardly wait to look at what she shot. She used to paint and I think has a creative streak. Yoichi won the best male dancer prize, a bag of short-grain Japanese brown rice!
 
I am driving up to Saugatuck tomorrow at 10:30 with Linda and Brock and I have not even started packing. It is ten o'clock Sunday night and I am tired. So I'll probably go to bed and just wake up early to pack. I want to take pictures and videos although I finished my third video this morning called The 14 Weekends of Saugatuck. It's a compilation of video and still shots from two trips I took to Saugatuck in 2007. I didn't go up there at all last year.

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