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adventures / history / Instagram / photo / video — Comments Off on A church, a park, swings and ads
3
Jan 16

A church, a park, swings and ads

Another beautiful day in Savannah. Here’s your proof, this is the Independent Presbyterian Church, organized in 1755:

The original church was built on land granted by King George II. A new church went up in 1816. The English restoration style, features Federal windows, Corinthian columns, that picturesque steeple, and a beautiful sanctuary with an elevated mahogany pulpit. It was destroyed by fire in 1889, but a duplicate was built on the same spot just two years later and the interior is faithful to that period, including the baptismal, which survived that fire and is still used today. President Woodrow Wilson’s first wife was born on the property. The great hymn writer Lowell Mason worked there for a time.

We found some swings:

I created some Boomerang videos:

A swing, the Boomerang app and Ren. @lmrsmith @laurnsmith

A video posted by Kenny Smith (@kennydsmith) on

I like watching the kids in the background. It is hypnotic, really.

Some of the trees in Forsyth Park:

And some of the ads that were hanging at the restaurant where we had dinner tonight. People today sometimes think flight-sweep was about tail fins. And while they do stand out, they only ran for another seven or so years on American roads after this ad. No, flight-sweep was really centered around Virgil Exner‘s lower, sleeker designs, inspiring car designers you still see even today:

Doesn’t this just make you want to fly to Hawaii?

adventures / Friday / video — Comments Off on Happy New Year
1
Jan 16

Happy New Year

There was a polar bear plunge at Tybee Island, Georgia today. We were in nearby Savannah, to celebrate the new year with a few quiet days of doing not much of anything. But The Yankee did do the plunge.

These two guys did, too:

But, wait, there’s a video:

It was something like 61 degrees in the air and, while the ocean was no doubt a chilly experience, it was hardly polar today. They say it was cooler last year.

From that same Tybee Island beach, about 12 hours earlier, we sat a few hundred yards up the beach from the New Year’s fireworks:

I tend to think we remember fireworks a bit differently, with a fuzzy recollection. So I like to shoot them that way.

Auburn / football / friends / memories / Monday / photo / video — Comments Off on Stuff from the weekend
23
Nov 15

Stuff from the weekend

There was a football game, and a flyover:

I took this picture:

And that’ll be the last of it, one way or the other. It is a sad thing in its own way, which I didn’t expect.

Also I snuck up on Allie and took this picture:

And she was completely oblivious when I took this one:

So I discovered yesterday that the cat likes graham crackers. Of course she likes graham crackers.

Finally, I ran in a fundraiser 10K yesterday. The Yankee did the 5K and I did the last half with the uncle of a friend of ours who was in town. He heard about this run and thought, “Hey, I’m retired, let’s impulsively run a 10K in jeans!” And he did. I want to be like him one day.

I finished second in my age group. I got an ornament and a gift card.

Samford / Thursday / video — Comments Off on And this is how you become a multimedia mini-mogul
19
Nov 15

And this is how you become a multimedia mini-mogul

In this time of ours, we can of course pass along any moment to anyone living in the same technological way. The seasons aren’t truly passable, fully sharable. Yet. People are working to change that. But they’re going to have to get the crunch of leaves and the smell of the air and that crispness in the ether. Maybe it is as much of an ideal as a season.

Anyway, go outside and see some autumn, if you have any left wherever you lovely people are.

leaves

I got a green screen. I’ve been making tutorials for the department and I wanted to step up the production values by about a half step. I’m doing this as a solo project, which means I get to be inventive and show initiative and create new skills for myself. I’ll show them all off someday, I’m sure. Anyway, it looks like this:

greenscreen

And I’m shooting it all on my iPad. I have an app that both records, runs a script prompter, throws graphics and projects images onto a the screen behind me. It was free and you can do a great deal as an awkward one-man band. Isn’t technology grand?

It is stacked on top of my old tripod:

tripod

I bought that in 1999. American Pie was a hit. Tonic was in heavy rotation. It cost $19.99 at Walmart. It was cheap even then, but I figured I could get a fair amount of use out of it. I lost one of the feet early on, I think at the beach, but the whole thing still works just fine. I have probably 45 tripods at my disposal, but sometimes you just have to chose the classics.

Auburn / football / friends / Monday / photo / video / weekend — Comments Off on Some Auburn weekend notes
2
Nov 15

Some Auburn weekend notes

Back at it again, then:

road

Brian came down this weekend. He pronounced the scoreboard large:

Brian

That’s been the attraction this year. The football team has struggled and continues to do so. They got outpaced in the second half by Ole Miss on Saturday. Can’t move the chains, kicking a lot of field goals, struggling to stop talented teams. It doesn’t feel like 4-4, but that’s what the record says.

But that scoreboard! And the eagle flights, of course. Here’s Spirit’s flight from before the game. Note the alternating sections of orange and blue. Looked pretty good on TV, I’m sure.

I just threw that video online without slapping a URL or any other branding on it. How daring! We walked up just in time to get a good spot near her cage, obviously. And then you can see she went all over the stadium. Spirit resides at the Southeast Raptor Center. He has a beak problem that requires regular maintenance, so she’ll always live there and do cool shows and flights like this.

What is interesting to me, the second and third time I watched that video, is the camera work of the production staff. I shot that on my phone, so the lens is wide and has practically no focus. But they’re following her all over the stadium. (When I lose her, just look at the giant scoreboard.) They do a nice job of keeping her in the frame too.

Hey, this is a wild animal. She can, and has, gone all of the places except the ones you expect.

It is a cool thing to see. Scoreboard isn’t bad, either.

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