A few people and I have decided that we need to be more creative in our day-to-day experiences. Hence we decided we should take the same video and audio clips and try to make videos on our own, and come back and share the outcome. This weekend I finished assignment 1. A bump inspired by Adult Swim, and the craptacular nature of the quality of the first 4 video clips. Sorry, but they were bad.
I got 3 out of the 4 videos in there in some way, and slowed the techno to sound nice and creepy.
I was excited to see the reintroduction of these little droids. Though it was not from one of my favorite movies in the Star Wars saga, the droids are still pretty cool, and a must have for a collector’s army. When I picked this pack up over the Lego Clone Troopers Battle Pack 7655 I wish I had payed more attention. The troopers finally come with guns that look like they did in the movies. These sets are now all back ordered. According to the lego site they will ship more in June. Bummer.
I’m a parts collector. 90% of the time I buy a set based on the parts in it. So you’ll rarely see me assemble what the box says I should. Case in point, this little critter I made before integrating the parts into my collection. I think it’s a mechanical dino-droid. I don’t know. I just made it while watching scrubs a week or so back. . .
BTW, if you really want these sets tomorrow, you can get them now used for $20. Or back order them through Lego for 10 and wait for them to ship.
All too often, I fear, we miss things right under our noses. Rather we don’t see, or choose not to see it is uncertain. But when you do see it, and you realize such, it can bring a smile to your face. Case in point, unwittingly, at some point in the evening I was clearing things from the table to take a picture of kraft dinner (eh?) and with out realizing it set up a comical interplay between a very cool robot L.E.D. lamp I got this Christmas and my telescope.
I had been using the gripper hand to hold a card to block some light (see snoots and gobos) from a previous subject and shoot. But when it got placed under the telescope, it almost looked like he was delivering a message and desperately trying to get the aloof telescope’s attention. When I happened to look up from what I was reading, fittingly enough a photography book, I saw it and chuckled to myself. So of course, I had to photograph it. I call it, “Excuse me sir, I have a message for you.”
It also reminded me of another Saturday morning when I was making breakfast. Just before I plunged the whisk into the bowl to scramble some eggs, I happened to look in to make sure one last time I hadn’t cracked any egg in with them and found them looking back at me. I grabbed the camera, and of course breakfast was delayed by a few moments. I’ve come to think of them as “Happy Eggs.”
Ask any of my friends I went to college with. I’m a former GEO Metro owner. Despite the feeling I was in a very small tin can, this car got me where I needed to be and usually with a little fun. Be it sitting at a stop light rocking the car back and forth like we would tip it, to crossing 10′ or so of mud my other 3 passengers thought we would surely get stuck in, or trying to climb dirt hills that only 4x4s could go up it never missed a beat. I even remember a time that all too late, Eric and I realized there was a 6″ drop from grass to parking lot with a granite curb. Darn Bangor Bestbuy and mall traffic! Stupid idea really to go between parking lots over nicely groomed lawns. Good thing the Metro contained a unibody with everything above the frame rail! What a great off roading car it could be with a little work. No, seriously.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad to be in a car that does not require the nightly feeding of squirrels. A car, that when one places an 8″ sub in the ‘trunk space’ you can fit something larger then a tissue. But when I read that someone successfully evaded the cops in their metro, I was shocked! I used to rev the engine at the light beside fancy cars and give the “lets race look” but never did I think I had a chance! Usually passenger and I would rock forward and back in the “lets help this thing up the hill” manner and give said fancy car drivers a good laugh.
I found a photo of ye olde metro for the slide of one of my 3d art projects where with carefully scaled foam kayak, I made my car out to be a truck and drove it around for several days. OMG, I had forgotten the deer ‘blood’ on the crash bar. Good times. And Dave and Eric, if you still have the footage of the metro tackling the hill in front of 16 york, hook me up!
I love happy accidents. When they happen, you think wow, why didn’t I think of purposely doing that. While playing with lighting last night I accidentally hit the zoom ring on my lens. What came out of it was a pretty badly ghosted image, but it showed potential. Now, I’m sure I’ve seen this technique before, so I know I’m not bringing anything wild and new to the world of photography, however it did look neat and was kind of fun to try to get right.
Basically, I threw my camera on a tripod, turned out all the lights except what remains on our Christmas tree and set the shutter speed to a second or two. Once I released the shutter, I let the focal length sit for a ‘second, then twisted the controls to zoom in on the tree. After a lot of experimenting, with how fast, how much, etc, I accomplished an effect that looked like the tree exploding from the center, or the lights shooting out like lasers while the rest of the room looks blurry, but normal.
Shown here is my personal favorite. It links to a gallery of 4, which I may add the other experiments later, but I think these sum up about 40-50 pictures well.
