Videoblogging: A YouTuber's process...

[VIDEO] YouTuuba does a video about the process for producing some of his videos for his channel. This video is about 30 mins and shows the cameras he uses (mainly still cameras), the storage media he uses, the GPS devices for his train trips, and of course his editing process. Some good pointers for those you who are looking to find ways to really up their YouTube game.

I've only recently started uploading videos to YouTube. I have hours of footage I have yet to upload and edit from an old miniDV camera (I still own one, but haven't used it in years). Of course in recent years many of the vids were shot n an iPhone with the added accessory of olloclip lenses for cellphones. Most of the time I'm very satisfied with the results.

One the other hand I see what YouTuuba is saying. If you're planning on any photography/videography have some redundancy. You don't have to do everything on these wonderful smart phones no matter the quality of the image or video. Something I need to get into the habit of myself as I could shoot pics or video with either my iPhone or my iPad.

Though one thing is true in my case, the reason I do use my iPhone or occasionally my iPad is that often they're readily available. Especially my iPhone as it's usually always on me when out and about. As far as a camcorder especially my miniDV camcorder it's bulky and not as easy to fool with when you realize it's time to record a moment for history. It's not as convenient.

So perhaps I should invest in a camera similar to what YouTuuba uses. That or buy a camcorder more up to speed for 2019. MiniDV camcorders are very aughts and largely obsolete (I probably would have to search far and wide for a miniDV tape. Though memory cards as the one seen in the above video are currently readily available to consumers.

Vlogging

YouTube.com

 Over the years I've written about those videoblogs that have been created over the years. These days videoblog aren't just blogs set up to exhibit videos now it's a YouTube channel. YouTube channels have grown in prominence over the years to the point where there's currently some activity on my YouTube channel.

There are some videos being posted that are more current and lately I wanted to upload some footage from my 2016 vacation on Amtrak's Southwest Chief to Los Angeles, California with jaunts to Las Vegas, Nevada and Grand Canyon, Arizona. Nothing groundbreaking or exciting just forcing myself to share some of the memories I created for myself over the years. That means I don't expect many of those videos to go viral.

To share these videos I may post some of them here though I had created a blog for that purpose to show photos and videos the new My Mind's Eye. Perhaps I'll have a feed in the sidebar - to replace the space a Feedjit widget used to take up - so that you can see what's new there although nothing much has been new there for a while.

I suppose you can say although I do have a YouTube channel I still want to create a platform similar to those long ago vlogs that I used to be a fan of. Of course I wanted to do some of the stuff they did, however, I feel as if I lack the talent and patience for editing. And the same for being creative like creating title cards or watermarks. Perhaps I'll get there and do all of those things the best way I knew how, just bear in mind this "blogmaster" is not a professional videographer.

As of late I have been using my iPhone to record videos (I've owned three generations of iPhones since 2012). Since 2015 I have utilized Olloclip to shoot photos and videos that have greatly enhanced my snapshots and videos. I should show you the difference between wide-angles, fish eye, or telephoto and then just use the lense on my iPhone that isn't enhanced.

Since about 2007 or 2008 I've also owned a mini-DV Sony Camcorder and from that time to now I see how firewire has fallen out of favor. If I owned the new generations of digital camcorders (or as I've learned I could just find a good still camera to shoot video) I could just used a simple USB process to upload video to a PC. As of now I have to figure out how to upload video from my mini-DV tapes without firewire.

Another thing I would like to do is find some editing software. Perhaps edit footage from my mini-DV tapes or edit iPhone videos. Now that I have a Windows 10 machine they don't seem to have a native complimentary video editing program that Windows machines from XP to Vista would provide. Even then those complimentary programs won't recognize an iPhone video which are typically MP4 or MOV.
  
I have some work to do on this but with some time or patience and a willingness to learn my YouTube channel will be a lot more active than it used to be. It doesn't matter to me if I don't get 100K subscribers and get that nice plaque and congrats from someone at YouTube. Just post for my own enjoyment and see what happens.

Snapshot on Thanksgiving

It's been years since I posted a mobile image on a blog. I was walking around downtown on Thanksgiving day with my iPad snapping shots. Took this shot of Pizzeria Due through the Blogger mobile app. Perhaps I'll share more from yesterday.

The abandoned Lincoln Mall

[VIDEO] I don't remember the last time being at this Matteson, IL mall before it's closing. Perhaps it was within the last decade and it look largely vacant at the time. In 2015 it was closed and Matteson is charged with finding a new use for the property.

In the meanwhile, this recent video shows us the inside of the mall. The video has an eerie soundtrack to it. The still pics you see at the end makes this abandoned place look even more creepy. I thought they were in there at almost dawn and that would make it more creepy.

Either way seems like a shame this mall lost business to the point where it is now closed.

The first ever webcam

[VIDEO] I often enjoy the videos of one 8-bit guy on YouTube. He likes to show us the technology of computers and how they evolved from the time they became available to the general public.

This recent look at a 20 year old webcam underscores how this technology has evolved. It was funny how he described using this device as almost similar to say a 19th century daguerreotype. You have to sit still for such a long exposure and for that reason no one smiled for a picture back in the day.

It was from this webcam that now we seem to use such cameras to monitor our homes for example.

#Selma 50 years later

From @jeffmason1: The Obama family and Bush family join marchers to cross Selma's Edmund Pettus Bridge. pic.twitter.com/NuMMx4F3XS
— WSB-TV (@wsbtv) March 7, 2015

Over the weekend there was a lot of news out of Selma, Alabama commemorating a famous civil rights march that started in that town (which also spawned a major motion picture based on those events 50 years ago). The bridge that was largely a symbolic epicenter of that event was host to a 50 year anniversary march which featured two Presidents of the United States.

I got to find out why former President George W. Bush decided to make his way to Selma with his wife Laura Bush. It certainly was a cool gesture as I truly believe the fight for civil rights back in the 1960s or even today is a just bipartisan cause.

Partisanship with civil rights in my mind has no standing in the demonstrations of 50 to 60 years ago. A segment of the population back then were being denied their rights and it was unacceptable. Most people who saw how civil rights activists were treated on their TV screens back then realized the same thing, hopefully.

So I've been seeing complaints that President Bush had been cropped out of the pic with President Obama. The uncropped pic you see above and the cropped pic you may have seen via the NY Times.

Now I'm not going to add onto the speculation to why this occurred. The question is was it partisan. If it was then I would say petty because I truly believe civil rights was right regardless of any political leanings. So if this was merely partisan then the cropping was certainly petty. Although the photograph claims this hadn't been intentional at all.

I recognize that many may not like President Bush whose administration lasted from 2001 to 2009 mainly because of his execution of the War on Terror. At the same time a Republican former president and a sitting Democrat president - who also happens to be Black - marching at a commemoration of a 50 year old event should be good press. It only shows that no one party or ideology can say they are the party of civil rights.

Time for a new camera...

In all the excitement over the new iPhone, I've realized another thing. It's time to get another camera and give the cameraphone a break.

It's really nifty to be able to take out the cell/camera/smart phone and take a quick snapshot. There are times it's more necessary to get a real camera with more capacity to take pictures as I used to do.

The longtime camera I had was a point and shoot which had a lense that allowed for focus and it got stuck. I took it apart and then couldn't get it back together where it would work again. Eventually i just forgot about that old workhorse sadly. :(

It was a point and shoot. Perhaps it's time to get another point and shoot. Better yet, perhaps it's time to get something more professional.

It's time to decide and time to take some pictures not on my phone again!

American Artifacts Preview: Charleston, South Carolina in 1865

[VIDEO] Courtesy of C-Span a photo exhibit of this southern US city taken near the end of the Civil War. While part of the collection at the Library of Congress, the curator here notes the technical process to clean up some of these images. In addition they talk about they preserve them so that these photographs can be exhibited.

Eadweard Muybridge: Man in motion

Found this article via The Economist. He was a British photographer who mainly practiced in California. His motion studies work is seen as the forerunner to the motion picture. Well if you don't understand "motion picture" it's what we call movies or film today. In fact we can even connect this to video since it's another medium of motion picture.

Muybridge is best known for his demonstration that movement could be broken down into fluid sequences of individual moments. That insight was made use of by a succession of artists, from Auguste Rodin to Francis Bacon. Muybridge’s motion studies can be fairly credited as the forerunners of the cinema. There is also evidence that in 1888 he shared with Thomas Edison some thoughts on combining a new projection system he had invented—the zoopraxiscope—with Edison’s phonograph. And the grid pattern of his bestselling books on locomotion survives in the format of comic strips.

A travelling exhibition, which began at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and has now opened in London, reveals Muybridge as much more than simply the pioneer of motion, however. Good close attention is paid to his biography, even if there are still important gaps. The very first line of the opening wall panel admits: “Where Muybridge learned his skill as a photographer remains unknown.” Other parts of his life are more familiar, in particular the fact that he coldbloodedly killed his wife’s lover. He was acquitted in part because a jury could not believe that a man who could lug the heavy and cumbersome photographic equipment of the time up into the Yosemite Valley could be entirely sane.

Muybridge did not just invent another name for himself. He excelled in a new industry, and made up more than just its technology as he went along. He was adept, for example, at marketing himself along with his photographs, and there is plenty of evidence of that in this show, from his illustrated trade cards and well-designed logos, to the many photographs of himself, quite naked, posing as a model in some of the motion studies.

For each major undertaking Muybridge invented the appropriate kind of photography to suit. His investigation of galloping horses for Leland Stanford, a California politician and racehorse owner, is well known. In each stride horses lift all four hooves off the ground at once, something that George Stubbs, the most famous horse painter of the last 300 years, had guessed at but which, until Muybridge, had never been proved. The beautiful cyanotype proofs for “Animal Locomotion” have recently been restored and are being given their first public outing in this show. There are also examples of the work Muybridge did up and down the Pacific coast for the national body in charge of lighthouses, including a sequence of unusual large-format seascapes completed in the 1870s, at precisely the time that Thomas Stevenson (father of Robert Louis) was designing his lighthouses around the coasts of Scotland.

When will this exhibit come to Chicago? I want to see this.

Oh yeah the galloping horse above well that's one of Muybridge's famous photographs.

Risking their lives to film the atomic bomb.

I read this article on my Blackberry found this from a link on Instapundit. This quote jumped at me, but this is really an interesting article sans that quote:

Mr. Yoshitake recalled documenting what a fiery explosion did to pigs — whose skin resembles that of humans.

“Some were still squealing,” he said. “You could smell the meat burning. It made you sick. I thought, ‘Oh, how terrible. If they were humans they would have suffered terribly.’ ”

Ummmm, those pigs were suffering!

Read the whole article!

Been a while since I browsed at flickr

Since I no longer have a Pro account there I really don't look anymore.

To be sure I only enjoyed it because it was free with my DSL package. When I got DSL at home in 2007 it was bundled with services from Yahoo. Flickr is a Yahoo service and with my DSL thru AT&T I could get most of the services provided by Yahoo.

Before I switched my Flickr account from a simple Yahoo account to AT&T account I utilized Yahoo Photos which eventually was phased out. Just as it was annouced recently that GeoCities is going to be phazed out eventually. Heh I see a trend GeoCities and AOL Hometown are going by the wayside these days.

Anyway I posted a pic that I found on Flickr today at The Sixth Ward and there are going to be more. It almost makes me want to post more pictures and then get a Pro account although now I have to pay for it. I indicated already that I was basically going to refuse to pay for something I originally got for free with the only benefits being that I can have all of my photosets and all of my pics available for viewing.

Anyway I would like to browse more and step up my photography game. I look forward to the day that I can get me a real camera, because all I have at this point is a simple point & shoot camera. It does the job. but using an SLR camera would be the dream at this point. If I'm good then hpefully my pictures would pay for a Flickr account.

Killing people is rude.

I was walking along the Magnificient Mile and I saw this image on the sidewalk outside of a jewelry store.

Originally posted at The Eye on May 21, 2007.

Lee Bey on storefront churches

From LeeBey.com:

Whatever the term, storefront churches are a disappearing breed now. The rise of religiously charismatic mega-churches has played a role. So did stricter practice of zoning laws (storefront churches are often a non-conforming use.) Years of increasing real estate values along commercial areas of black Chicago have driven out many of these churches. Why rent for pennies to a small church when you've got CVS, Walgreens and others offering you a tidy bundle to demolish your building?

The churches are worth noting and documenting while they're still around. They are a step in the black American religious experience in the post-Great Migration north. Architecturally, they have their own vernacular and represent often ingenious examples of adaptive reuse. Amen? Amen.

You know I wanted to address what he said earlier in his post in him saying that this term has become something of a slur...

The term ascribed to them---"storefront churches"---became a bit of a slur, conjuring up stereotypes of shady preacher/pimps with processed hair and new Cadillacs parked in the rear.

I'm sure many of us may have those same sensibilities when we find such a church. It's probably ministers like these that probably would cause some people to just not go to church or at worst might lose faith in Christianity.

At the same time, some of these churches have been built up overtime to megachurches. Reverend Meek's Salem Baptist Church didn't have the congregation is does today, once upon a time. They started with a small group say less than 25 people. Creflo Dollar at World Changers in Atlanta had a similar size group starting off. I'm sure once upon a time the Catholic Church started with a small number of people to eventually become one of the most powerful churches or religious institution or Christian denomination in the world.

If not that I'm sure in some of these churchs the faith of some individual was solidified indeed brought alive, but these storefront preachers. Still I suppose one must choose carefully who they want to put their faith in.

Also, and this is my conclusion. Churches to me are only bricks and mortar. People make them holy (however you may define that). Especially the people who worship there or indeed the people who effectively lead their flock in such a building.

Check out Mr. Bey's post there and look at his other photos of storefront churches around the city of Chicago.

The Reality Of War, Ctd.

This image shocks me. At first I thought it was a dismembered head, but it turns out this pretty young girl was merely buried in some rubble. Unfortunately she's a casualty of the new war in the Middle East between the Palestinians and the Israelis. Will that war ever come to a peaceful conclusion?

You can read more details at The Daily Dish!

Yahoo! Pulls the Plug on Flickr for AT&T and Verizon Subscribers

This news is especially disappointing to me because I actually use the service and I enjoyed the perk unfortunately not enough to want to pay almost $25 for a pro-account. A pro-account is a step above a regular account in that a pro-account allowed me to post unlimited pictures, unlimited sets, and allowed me to see the image in a larger resolution. By February I will no longer have that perk.

Reading this article on the subject (I found it using Google) they attributed this decision to the ails of Yahoo's business. I recall that it was in the news when Microsoft seemed very keen on buying Yahoo, but nothing could be finalized. Indeed it's probably safe to say that Yahoo wasn't so keen on being bought by Microsoft. In any case cutting off their relationship with AT&T and Verizon is one way to get an infusion of cash although this article indicated that there might be an exodus to other photosharing websites on the internet.

I've only had a Flick Pro account for the better part of a year. I've only had DSL at home for over a year as well. Ironically enough Flickr became the program of choice when Yahoo decided to close Yahoo!Photos in favor of Flickr. At that point I moved some of those pictures over to Flick and started by Pro account.

I should also note that up until recently Yahoo seemed to have had a deal with SBC and then AT&T to pool their services. Thus I could lot onto my AT&T email thru Yahoo! Mail and other services such as the aforementions Yahoo! Photos and even a service I used to use frequently MyYahoo!. I don't know when that partnership ended but I suppose that is how one could view the end of the free ride by bother AT&T and Verizon users on Flickr.

I hate to say that I'm going to give up on Flickr, the primary reason is because I like Flickr. It's less of a place that merely stores your pictures, but it's certainly a social network that allows other photographers to let you know how much they like your images. Unforunately it looks like I must consider other options.

Perhaps Zoomr is one possible alternative and it is the most like Flickr.

I think I've learned something again

On Saturday I went to the Seaway Bank Community Art Fair. There were some good work and other products to be had there. I really like one artists painting of the Chicago Skyline.

He's either got the Skyline at night, at sunset, or during the day. It was the most vibrant paintings I have ever seen. I just wish that I had $300 or so dollars to make a purchase. The paintings would have done the city proud and of course they looked like a lot of work was put into the paintings.

BTW, what have I learned on this day?

Well I had my camera with me to document the scene but a lady called me out and told me to not take pictures of her work, it was copyright infringement. The only thing I could have reasoned was that I wouldn't have made her work out to be my own. That probably wasn't the point and while I can't say I liked that, my personal policy is to respect that. The main reason being is that it's her property.

In any case I had to ask some questions and look things up about copyright infringement. It wasn't entirely illegal to take a pic of her or any artists work. Indeed I was just taking pictures, the only problem is that if I made it public, that is I post a digital picture onto this blog and someone might download that pic and hang it on the wall without having to know who that particular artist is nor would they want to make a purchase. While I'm sure this can be a scare tactic without requiring more information and because I moved on I sort of saw her explanation as baloney. It would have been enough to just ask that I not take any pictures of her work.

Of course I'm sure in situations like this, it's got to be about the money. If she could benefit by me posting a pic of her work especially if I was to sell the pic or indeed place the pic in a book. At least something that results in a financial gain for me then she'd want a part of that action. In that case I can't blame her for trying to be proactive. Though sometimes I wonder if that might hamper any sales of her works, especially if her goal is to be protective.

I don't want to run into any trifles and I'm not going to make a tense situation worse. Most of the time I find it easier to just cease and desist and not argue. If no harm was intended I hope that a situation such as this doesn't turn into a very serious one.

Oh and if there is a lawyer in the house who can further clarify this scenario and copyright infringement then by all means please do. Although I'm not asking to hire a lawyer. Just consider this a crash course more than anything else.