Posted by Barron • Living • Kids • Comments • Permalink

Last night Koa told me, “I don’t want my dreams to come true because in my dreams, I am at school and my pants fall down and my arms are so short that I can’t pull them back up. I’d rather have my wishes come true.” That made me laugh.

Posted by Barron • Personal • Random Thoughts • Comments • Permalink

A couple months ago, I lost my Sandisk Clip mp3 player. The last time I saw it, it was plugged into our stereo upstairs. We had some people over including a bunch of kids so I am pretty sure I put it away somewhere for safekeeping, but I haven’t been able to find it. I also lost the center post to my compact tripod. Bay had removed it so that he could adjust the tripod really low to the floor for one of his stop-motion animation projects. I found the post once, and put it back on the tripod, but a few days later Bay worked on another project and removed it again. I vaguely remember taking the post and putting it somewhere safe. Well, you know how that goes!

So last night I decided to go room-by-room and search every inch for these two items. Unfortunately, my search came up empty. However, I did find a few other things that I had lost or forgot that I even owned! Firstly, I found my two “hanko” or signature stamps. My grandfather gave me one of them when I started painting back in my teens, and I picked up the other one during a visit to Hong Kong. I’ve been thinking of creating a watermark for photos using these, but didn’t know where they were. Secondly, I found a nice 72mm circular polarizing filter. I bought this around 1989 for an old zoom lens. My new 16-50mm lens uses this same filter size so that was a bit of a score.

I’m happy that I found these two things, but still kind of perplexed about where the mp3 player and tripod post could be. I checked all my pockets of all my clothes for the mp3 player, and then all the places that I would think I would put the tripod post for safe-keeping but no dice. A mystery!

Posted by Barron • Creativity • Photography • Comments • Permalink

I’ve been using my new camera for the past couple months, and have learned that there’s one thing that I really love most about it. Sure the performance is excellent and light-years beyond my old Konica-Minolta 7D, but what I like best about the A77 is the articulating rear screen. It makes it so easy to take shots from a variety of angles, especially low-angle photos. When I have the camera around my neck, I can quickly flip the screen down (I usually have the screen facing inwards for protection) and have a waist-level camera. It’s almost like a modern-day TLR but without the reversed image. I think that it’s a more interesting (or at least less-common) view angle for photos than the standard eye-level.

And if I want to take a shot even closer to the ground, I can just bend over and lower the camera; no need to get down on my stomach to look thru the viewfinder! In fact, these are the kinds of shots that I would never take before because they were just such a hassle that I wouldn’t even think of doing it. Not only can I take kids-level photos, but now even dog-level photos!

Here’s a shot where I flipped the viewfinder out and then sideways. I should have leveled it a bit, but still, I like the angle.

Posted by Barron • Creativity • Film and Video • Review • Comments • Permalink

We went to watch ”The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn” the other night at the Flix Brewhouse. I hadn’t heard of this movie until pretty recently and when I saw the trailer, I thought that I had to go see it. It’s set in a time period that I really like (maybe the 30’s or early 40’s) and is full of adventure in exotic places. It really reminded me of the Indy movies, which isn’t surprising since this is also a Spielberg movie. When they were on the ship, I thought I heard a little bit of Indy music (John Williams!)!

I really enjoyed the animation (it looked amazing!) and the action, but I felt that there was maybe a little too much action. The chase scene where Tintin goes after Sakharine’s bird went on for way too long. I felt that the entire continuous scene was tiresome. There were some cool little puzzles like how the bulletproof glass was shattered, but I wish there were more of those. Instead, there was just more action. I thought the crane duel was actually pretty silly. But I was blown away by the pirate battle. That was really well-done! So for next time, I’m hoping for more evenly-spaced action sequences with a decent amount of “downtime” and clever puzzles.