On Saturday while the boys were taking swimming lessons I spent around 45 minutes walking around the neighborhood in search of stuff to shoot with my new camera and lens. It's been so long since I've used anything other than a point-and-shoot camera that my eye for photos is not what it used to be. I HDR'd the best shot:
On Sunday Tony and Andy's elementary school held classes and invited parents to come and watch the last class of the day being conducted. I brought the camera, figuring ya'll might like to see what a schoolroom looks like.
New Year's is the one occasion when everyone "gets religion" here and pays a visit to a temple. It's called hatsumode. Some show up at midnight, others visit during the day. Our family always goes late in the morning of Jan. 1.
It's 6am and I just finished this video. I would have gone to bed hours ago, but I've been trying to fix a problem with Windows Movie Maker that's putting an annoying blast of audio static between some clips during mixdown. It's technical glitches like this that drive me nuts. Sorry to those of you listening with headphones.
Next podcast I'll talk a bit about New Year's here and explain some of the things you see in this video.
Update: I re-encoded it with Videora because it looked like shit. (Quicktime Pro does a horrible job with MPEG-4 compression.) Looks much nicer now, fewer artifacts, and I added letterboxing by running it through VirtualDub's resize filter before encoding to H.264.
Last weekend we were at Ito Yokado, one of two department store/supermarkets in Koga, so Tony could get his video game fix. Right before we left, I took the video camera out of my backpack, turned it on and walked through the supermarket holding the camera as inconsicously as possible. Since I couldn't see what I was filming, the video is crooked and jumpy. I'm tempted to figure out how to attach the camera to the front of a shopping cart in a way that won't draw too much attention. And also to buy a wide-angle lens for it.
Here's the RSS feed for the The Herro Flom Japan Video Clip Chumbucket:
I'll try to do a better one sometime in the future. This one's like looking at the world through the eyes of a midget with one leg a lot shorter than the other.
