New Soundslides project

The town's new policy advisory committee met tonight and I wanted to see how long it would take to create a Soundslides project with audio more or less synched; that seems to be the tough part. Click on captions for slide info, and I'd say it took about two and a half hours from start to finish. Wow, now I've three copies, but only the top counts since I was fixing cutlines

About the Soundslides project

You'll note a Soundslides project below, Irish Summer, based in shots from June, 2005. I do like the photos from Ireland and really, really got tired of hearing my voice over and over as I learned how to edit a track. I'm enjoying the process all the same and now am pondering opportunities to use such audio slide projects at work. There I can at least use the company servers, rather than find my own online host. For anyone wanting to post video or Soundslide projects to Blogger, WebNG.com is a great resource. It will host up to 350MB at no charge.

Leap, then look

There's a new web community that might offer a good deal in learning/absorbing this wired journalism world:


View my page on Wired Journalists


So now I just have to see where it leads

MediaShift . Digging Deeper::Your Guide to Blogging | PBS

MediaShift . Digging Deeper::Your Guide to Blogging | PBS

Dramatic skies

There's something about the 4/3 format that annoys me. I still think 8 X 10 is a proper size for prints, so I wind up cropping once in the viewfinder and once again for prints. But leaving that aside, i'd like to print one of these for a presentation shot. Any suggestions? Anyone?

Obsessions and overexposure

"I do think that the quality which makes a man want to write and be read is essentially a desire for self-exposure and is masochistic. Like one of those guys who has a compulsion to take his thing out and show it on the street." - James Jones

Okay, but now J.J., how do we explain women writers, as well as the photographers of both sexes? Hmm....

Enough is never enough

Not content to spend thousands on still cameras, I've decided to learn what I can about shooting video. There's an otherwise laughable point-and-shoot camera at the office that will shoot adequate video for the web--but the problem has been the audio. There's a tiny and inadequate mike in the camera, but that means the sounds that are recorded may have no connection to what's being filmed (can I still call it that?).

So, I’ve put off making video while I found a reasonable digital recorder and I picked up this Olympus WS-100 today. It's PC-only because it uses Windows Media Audio and that is next to useless to me on my Macs. Cutting the story short, however, I found there are a number of audio file conversion programs available on line, so I wound up with one, 'Switch' from Australia, and the necessary plug-in, 'Flip4Mac'.

Now I can convert .wma to mp3 or .wav or a myriad of other formats, and import audio into iMovie HD where there seems to be three audio tracks. I've been fooling tonight with two and I expect that'll be enough--most of the time.

The funny thing about technology is that there is never enough 'all of the time.'

When I get a little ahead in this, I’ll post a video of small town Nova Scotia.

Seiner from the snows

Well, as I was finishing the previous post one of the herring seiners drifted in from the snowswept Bay of Fundy, and the camera was sitting on the floor just begging to be used. Mind you, I had to change the settings from the hockey game; I don't need an ISO setting of 1000 today, and I guess I'd better reset the file to RAW. I'll shoot sports in medium or large-size jpegs, but almost everything else benefits from being shot in RAW.

I'm back. Let the bells ring out! The banners fly!

Okay, I'm back after something of a small absence. While I was gone, it appears Blogger has become part of the Google Empire, but I'm not objecting. Yet.

Although I've been away, that doesn't mean I haven't been writing—and photographing. I even have another blog, one on the company's website. This past year has been a pretty intensive period of learning new equipment and new programs, and the future doesn't appear to offer less of that. That’s something to look forward to; I don't ever want to get to the stage where I give up on learning something new.

I don't know yet whether I want to link to my other blog. This one may become a little less specific although with a name like 'frustrated fotog' how far astray can I wander. I think what I might like to do is post photos (my own) that appeal at the time. Few photos seem to have the kind of longevity that I found years ago with my drawings and paintings, but it may just be that I take thousands of photos, and there's always something new to capture the eye. That's undoubtedly part of the frustration of photography.

As I type this I’m looking around at some of the options available, and I see icons for adding photos and video. The latter is my next field of study because I’d like to see what I can do with the equipment I have available, and what I might find for audio. If I can reasonably master iMovie, I can do two audio tracks by the look of it. Now the question is, if I post a video in this blog, who is hosting it? Google? Me?

Technologically, I’m either a babe or a dodderer. I keep plugging away and hope that all—or a substantial apart thereof—will someday become clear.