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.

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.

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.