With advanced video editing software, it’s not hard to add special effects to a photo or video: blur, ripples, waves, mirror reflections, tiling and so on.
What is hard is figuring out what adds value. In this respect, video editing is just like text editing, where adding graphics might or might not improve the final product. Continue reading
Manhattan has oodles of iconic things to photograph: images everyone would associated with the city.
Manhattan is also crowded: crowded with people and with buildings. Maybe you’d noticed.
Lacking a filming permit that would allow me to close the street, I couldn’t do much about the people except shoot over their heads. Lacking a bucket truck or a scissor lift, I couldn’t do much about the buildings, either.
We share the Beaufort Sea with the USA, but our continental shelf is about twice as wide as theirs, so there.
Demarcating the boundaries of oceanic bodies of water is more of a naming convention than anything else, at least in this case.
The Beaufort Sea can be taken to include the whole of the clockwise gyre of the Canada Basin of the Arctic Ocean north of Alaska, Yukon and the Mackenzie Delta coast, bounded on the east by Banks Island and Prince Patrick Island. Alternatively, it has been defined as that part of the Arctic Ocean lying south and east of a line connecting Point Barrow, Alaska, and Lands End, Prince Patrick Island. – The Canadian Encyclopedia
Did you mean: barn slow but?
I shake my head. What?
Did you mean: barn slow but?
Yup, that’s what it says. Continue reading
The original: I railed about the use of disconnected headlines on emails from as intellectual a publication as Smithsonian Magazine, and linked it to Neil Postman’s analysis of the values of the TV age.
The follow-up: Wired Magazine wrote about the decline of the internet and Wikipedia as it morphs into a graphics- and not text-based medium. They also cite Postman.
Social networks, though, have since colonized the web for television’s values. From Facebook to Instagram, the medium refocuses our attention on videos and images, rewarding emotional appeals — ‘like’ buttons — over rational ones. Instead of a quest for knowledge, it engages us in an endless zest for instant approval from an audience, for which we are constantly but unconsciously performing.
One of the great things about wintering in metro Phoenix is the chance to watch Spring Training games.
With the World Series on, it’s fun for me to go back to look at where this season started. I like reflections in general, and in sunglasses in particular.
Chasing around to get ready to go to New York, I realized that all the fun topics–travel retrospectives, stories–would take more time than I had.
So what I did for this week and next were short technical exercises. This week, a 0:38 piece working with eight video clips from my visit to Carleton’s butterfly display. It’s short, but it required more track management and trickier music synchronization than I’ve tackled before.
One day this past week, our walk took us first to Chapman Mills Conservation Area, a marshy area along the Rideau River about 15 minutes by car from our house. Except for a pair of mallards and some gulls, the usual birds had all gone: redwing blackbirds, waxwings, swallows.
On the other hand, the fall colours were showing at their best, with a big blue sky overhead.
And the dragonflies were practically swarming the joint, on one of those fall days with summer temperatures.
Band-winged meadowhawk
Autumn meadowhawk
Thanks to a super helpful communication technician at Ontario Nature for identifying that I had photos of not one but two species (blush). It turns out that there are more dragonfly species than I dreamt of. I can’t speak for Horatio. Check out this pretty comprehensive list for Ontario.
Not a fan. I want to get that out of the way at the start. I can’t speak from the heart on this one.
I’m not not-a-fan, either. I wouldn’t recognize a Hip song if one fell on me. At 65, I’m too old to have grown up with the Hip’s music, and I’m too country/folk to have searched out their music as an adult.
But it’s completely clear that Gord Downie and the Tragically Hip are Canadian national treasures: for their music, for their place in Canada’s music scene, and for Gord’s activism. Continue reading
Posted: 2025 Jun 13
Thanks to John Whitman for this slightly dismayed face from downtown Ottawa.
This space is available for other submissions.
