Still looking through boxes and files. Finding little treasures.
Staying out of the heat today.
Got up early this morning to do some yard maintenance before it got too hot. I hit the pool at 7:55, ready to swim. The staff at the club is doing a good job keeping the water temperature low during a string of 100°+ days and even though 82° water temperature isn't optimal keeping it in that zone is pretty amazing.
We have a coach who has decided that our Thursday 8 a.m. workouts will be Individual Medley workout days. Instead of concentrating on long distance freestyle or race-paced freestyle swims we're going to concentrate on all four strokes. Butterfly, breaststroke, backstroke and freestyle. This focus on all the strokes always brings out the moans, groans and bitching from the triathletes who only want to work on their freestyle for tri competition. But all of us former high school and college swimmers welcome the once familiar stroke assortment as a prime example of good cross training.
We had about 30 people at this morning's workout. There is an earlier workout that goes from 7:00 till 8:00 and it attracts a dedicated following of the most driven of the swimmers, and also a lot of people who have to show up somewhere for work by 8:30 or 9:00. The early people sometimes disparagingly refer to the later workout as "The Executive Workout" on the premise that we have more control over our personal schedules. Or no schedules at all. We prefer to call it "The Varsity Practice..."
We had the usual 1,000 yard warm-up today but then the fun began. We starting doing dolphin kick drills and that was the precursor to a butterfly-heavy slog.
The set was complex. It went like this:
1 x 25 yards butterfly
1x50 yards backstroke/breaststroke
1 x 25 yards freestyle
1 x 100 yards I.M. (all four strokes).
2 x 25 yards butterfly
2 x 50 yards backstroke/breaststroke
2 x 25 yards freestyle
2 x 100 I.M. yards (descending times = ascending effort)
3 x 25 yards butterfly
3 x 50 yards backstroke/breaststroke
3 x 25 yards sprint freestyle
3 x 100 yards I.M.
4 x 25 yards butterfly (descending times = each one faster than the one before)
4 x 50 yards backstroke/breaststroke (descending)
4 x 25 yards freestyle sprints
4 x100 yards I.M. ( also descending ).
Followed by a warm down.
The butterfly got harder and harder. I can see I've got a lot of work ahead of me....
It's fun to do this against a pace clock, on set intervals, with lots of like-minded people bent on going fast and touching the wall before everyone else. I never get tired of the competition... or the thrill of just being in the water. My sense of gratitude was just off the charts this morning.
Thinking of heading up to to Richmond, Virginia in the first week of August to swim two or three events at the USMS National Championships. We'll see what the schedule looks like....
A nice Summer to stay wet.
If you don't need Raw video files you'll want to look at what you can do in Apple ProRes. Because you can shoot that to an internal card in up to the 5728 by 3024 (17:9) format at 29.97p. Make sure you have a fast CFexpress card installed because those ProRes HQ files are 1.9 Gigabits per second. A bit faster than the 400 Mbps in a camera that's....less capable. You can shoot ProRes 422 at lower rates and at a straight ahead 4K setting and you'll actually end up with files that are fast and fun to edit. But.... it takes a bit of mental adjustment to reconfigure your brain for bigger data deposits.
I really like the color and tonality the GH6 video files deliver. I think it's an amazing camera even though it may have a few quirks. I also like the lenses I've put together for the system although most are long while most video projects seem to lean into the wide angles.
And once again the timing is weird.
I got an e-mail from a client last week asking about a video project. I'm on the fence about whether I want to bid the project or not. It would require a bunch of pre-production, script supervision, the casting of one talent and the negotiating for a wide package of national or international usage for the talent, several full days of shooting, the services of a sound person, enough freelance assisting staff to cover a typical on location corporate shoot, and a ton of editing on the backend. Which I would happiest farming out.
The problem for me is that the project is in an industry that's not exciting. The client is....careful and aesthetically conservative. The samples they've shared are not challenging or especially exciting and I'm not even sure I want to work in Austin during August. Seems like a better time of year to escape to somewhere cooler and more laid back (which in itself is a wry statement about the directions in which Austin has grown. We used to be the capitol of "Laid Back").
One of my peers and I discussed all this over the phone this afternoon and his advice, as usual, was that I should bid the project so high that I'd be delighted to get to do it. And I understand the financial appeal but I'm still not all that interested. It's a lot of work. And responsibility. And missed swims...
My plan for the near future is to work with the GH6 everyday and in every way until I am intimately familiar with every video menu setting, every switch and every capability of the camera. If I decide to do the project (and am actually awarded the bid) I don't want to start the learning curve at that juncture, I want to be ready to go. I want to be completely confident that I can deliver.
It's pretty much the perfect system to use on a gimbal and this project would be shot on a gimbal 100% of the time.
Of course the idea of bidding the price delightfully high --- and then getting the project --- opens up my mind to the idea of also snagging a Leica SL2-S and testing that camera side by side with the GH6. Now that actually sounds like fun.... Low light champ versus in-depth video monster. It never stops.
I have to decide just how much I want to keep my hand in the video game in the next couple of days. Compared to tradtional photography it's quite a bit more work. Maybe I'm just getting lazy.
It's a hot day. I slept in. There's no swim practice today so why get up early?
By nine it was already on the way to boiling outside but the light looked pretty and soft coming through the thick white curtains, through the French doors.
The air conditioning was purring smoothly and the air in the house was cool and dry.
I made a big cup of coffee, settled into my favorite reading chair in the main room, and got to work reading the novel I just started last night.
Truth be told I didn't move from that chair for the next four hours. I was paralyzed by the tingly anticipation the story and the writing generated. Compelled to read to the end to see how everything turned out.
When I looked up after reading the last page it was two fifteen in the afternoon.
John Sandford had kept me enthralled and focused like a laser for half the day. It was that 2019 book of his; "Bloody Genius." His main character, Virgil Flowers is the guy we'd all like to have as a best friend. Smart, insightful, human and kind. And if I were really a writer I'd want to be just like John Sanford.
The whole process of getting lost in a fun, fast, great novel brought back to me memories of Summers in sleepy San Antonio, one of three kids in my parent's house spending most hot Summer afternoons glued to books. Stacks of books from the library. Getting lost in fiction. Discovering new worlds and making the acquaintance of people who weren't real but maybe should have been.
It's a quiet day here. The mercury has already scooted past 100. The humidity outside is like a scratchy wool sweater against bare skin.
B. has her book in one of the back rooms at the other end of the house. I only logged on here now to order another John Sanford book. The writing is more addictive than heroin..... It's going to be a long Summer.
Stay cool. Don't hold any fireworks too close to your face. Try to keep your fingers attached. Be traditionally patriotic. Be genuinely appreciative of whatever you've got. And enjoy your holiday.
Me? Firing up the Kindle.... chilling a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc for later.
It's an odd end to the week. I got a request to bid on a video project for a pharmaceutical company. Came in via email about 10 minutes after I said to myself, "I wish I had a fun video project to do so I could get some use out of that new GH6...". I'll bid on the adventure and see where it goes. I did a good photo project for the same company last year and they seem to have come back around to us based on the success of that campaign.
The bidding process for video is so arcane. Mostly because you can never tell how long the edit will take. People love to make endless changes to video timelines. And endless tweaks to the motion graphics. Shooting the footage is actually the easy part.
No guarantee that I'll get the project but I decided to pull out the two gimbals we use most for stabilization and make sure the rechargeable batteries are still good. They should be okay since we put them on their chargers every three or four months.
Not sure I want to get pulled back into all the minutia of a project that requires models/talent/actors but I'm hoping that's what a good producer is for. I have one in mind. Ran into her at a recent event. She's still working on film and video productions here in Austin. It's always nice to hand off stuff like casting...
Another odd thing this week. Do you remember the video I did of Chanel as Billie Holiday at Zach Theatre? https://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/search?q=chanel+video
Here is Chanel performing for the fundraiser video we created content back in the Summer of 2020. It's her Tina Turner character: https://vimeo.com/462396471 (Shot with a G9 on a gimbal, incidentally...).
Anyway, back in the fog of Covid I heard that she auditioned for and won the role of Tina Turner in a live theatrical production in the West End, London. Big time. Amazing show. Famous venue.
I was very pleased for her.
Then I read this week in the New York Times (or maybe it was the Washington Post....the heat, remember?) a short article saying that just last week, near the end of the run of the show, the management let her go. Apparently she'd been invited to perform with the Rolling Stones, in concert, in Milan, Italy. In order to sing with Mick Jagger she had to miss one performance of the Tina show. Not a tough choice in my book. I'd pick the Rolling Stones every time.
At any rate it seemed strange to read about all the drama in a national newspaper. Chanel is quite a talented performer. I just didn't know she was that famous.
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I photographed with the new (to me) Leica CL today. It was way too hot to do anything complex or even anything that required much effort. In the end I posted one photo of some chairs. Summer is starting to wear on all of us here in Austin. If I walk through the neighborhood in the evening I can sometimes hear the families in their homes praying together that the power not go out and that the air conditioning continue to work.
I hope their prayers are heard. Coolness is good.
Walking over to the Cookbook Cafe to have coffee with my video producer friend, James. Saw the chairs. Decided to see if the new (to me) Leica CL works. It does.
James and I have decided that firing bad clients is the most fun thing to do this Summer. We're only keeping the ones that: we like. who have a sense of humor. who pay their bills on time. and the ones who hire us because they actually like our work.
I'm amazed there are still more clients in Austin right now than there are good photographers to service them.
Also can't believe that I typed that part out loud.
Time once again to raise those rates. Not just talking to myself...