Video on iMovie close to finished

I am down to the last few minutes of the 20-minute video on my trip to Dubrovnik in 2004. I may have to trim what I have on the timeline already because the video already lasts 15 minutes with the main activity, the city tour, has just begun! When finished, this will be the first video I've completed since doing "Brock in Michigan" in August 2007.
 
I am using iMovie for this edit, just as I did in 2007. I want to have a couple of new videos under my belt before resuming work on the heftier FCP editing suite.

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Cranberry Juice and Primordial Energies

I shouldn't have any sugar in my diet but drinking unsugared cranberry juice would be a challenge. It is bitter, not something one thinks of as part of a human diet. But cranberries are reportedly good for the kidneys, cleansing them out as Hercules washed the Augean stables of ages of accumulated horse manure in one day by diverting the Alpheus and Peneus Rivers! Alpheus is the same river in one of my favorite English poems, Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Kubla Khan; or a Vision in a Dream: a Fragment:
 
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
 
Pure evocation!
 
For me art is the evocation of some primal experience we no longer have access to. All that remain of these deeply forgotten experiences are dreams and the unexplainable reactions we have to objects we see or taste or smell. Strange, even eerie objects sometimes elicit powerful emotions that themselves don't fall into definable categories. We think we live in ordered spaces, universes for which we have names, whereas reality is infinitely vast, infinitely varied, inconceivable by our limited scope of knowing. Some days I feel myself on the edge of the known universe and hover close to the Unknown, feel its primordial energy pulling at me and I am torn between my allegiance to the familiar and this strange, compelling interest in worlds beyond my everyday experience.

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Ruins and the Primal Imagination

Greek ruins continue to fascinate me. These skeletal remains of marble columns once painted with the bright colors of Mediterranean sky, earth, sun, and sea are highly evocative. I should feel the same way towards the artifacts of ancient Asian civilizations but for me there really are East and West and they evoke different primal emotions. Inchoate emotions coupled with equally deep memories we no longer visualize still affect us in some deep part of the psyche where they swirl chaotically in the mythic sea stirred by the primal winds that initiated creation in the first place.

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Colors in the Dark

Colors against black, light and shadow: I love photographs for these. I shot this on a lark last night because I liked the color of cranberry juice in a wine glass. I like it so much that I might use it on a new website, if I get around to redoing my site.

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Relearning computer tasks

Without my photo internal HD, I am relearning how to do photography tasks. On the USB drive, access to the files is so slow with Adobe Bridge and Photoshop that I copied the files to another internal HD for now until the replacement drive arrives.

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Recovering from Digital Disaster

I decided against trying to recover my photo files from the failed HD via a Seagate affiliate and just move on. I did back up my model and most of my foreign travel photos. I am still discovering what I lost in the drive, like model contact notes, photography business files, etc. I organized the files on that drive just the day before it failed. I was so proud of myself: all my photography files organized into personal, travel and model folders going back to 1999!
 
Seagate did have an easy warranty-return procedure. I opted to pay $20 to get a replacement drive in two days (will probably mean I'll get it on Monday) and paid UPS label and packing (from the drive they are sending me: clever!). I am still waiting for my OWC RAID array that was supposed to save me from this disaster but itself ended up being defective.
 
The lovely thing about all this is how losing the files has been relatively easy. I credit Buddhist practice for this. The ultimate goal of practice is dealing with loss more critical than a mere hard drive!
 
I continued processing files from my trip to Hungary in 2004. Using the backup USB drive demonstrated how an internal SATA drive is so much faster! I think I'll wait to process any more photos until after I get the replacement drive back. I shall probably receive that the same day I get my RAID back-up array from OWC.
 
Meanwhile an Indian couple has invited me for lunch. Life is really largely what happens beyond what we plan to do, beyond what we spend our time thinking and worrying about!

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Turning Pro in Digital Content Creation

I am surprisingly calm considering I just lost my entire collection of photographs going back to 1999. I spent two hours yesterday organizing them into a more coherent system and then this morning the drive failed just like that. 

It's a Seagate internal drive, one of a pair I bought in August 2008, barely a year ago. It had a five-year warranty and cost twice what a one-terrabyte drive costs nowadays. I am thinking: okay, so I lost all the photos I shot so far this year, but the photos that really matter—my travel and model shoots—are backed up to a FireWire external drive. I can start really ruthlessly erasing photo images that don't meet a professional standard of quality instead of cluttering my hard drives with largely unusable files.

My first photo hard drive failed last year which was why I bought the internal hard drives. I am in the process of procuring a workable RAID array. The Qx2 RAID 5 array from OWC arrived defective June 12. OWC has been working on it since then. I suppose that if the RAID array had worked from the start I would have backed up the photo drive which was one of the two reasons I ordered it. No sense crying over spilt milk. The other reason is what I intend to move my work towards: doing videos.

This is not justification after the fact. I believe that the work I have done until today has been a kind of exploration via self-directed apprenticeship in the field of digital content creation. I still have many miles to go but the past year and a half has cobbled together a credible foundation of experience and expertise that I can say I do want to go deeper into this new career field. I just can't see myself going back to what I did for 30 years. It is truly a new era for me.

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