Scattered Thoughts . . .

S ince my last two video experiments created by using only still images captured in a fast burst mode on the camera were successful and actually came out better than I expected, I decided that perhaps I should try to come up with a way to effectively mimic old Super 8 home movies too.   For this new experiment, I chose a short clip of our grandson, Lukey, playing tabletop shuffleboard at Agave Taco & Tequila Casa. ________________________________________________________ I should start with a disclaimer...  This particular video clip was perhaps the most challenging clip I could have chosen for this experiment.  I did this purposely just to see what I could do.  This video clip was a high contrast clip with deep blacks and dark shadows.  Additionally, it was a highly compressed video which minimizes any leeway in editing the file.  In the future, if I want to mimic old 8mm/Super 8 home movies, I'll use a more appropriate clip captured using more app...

B ack about a month ago, I wrote about our two year old grandson getting a new bicycle from Gee and Papa for his birthday.  Liza and Ace spent the morning with us before we all headed to a local park.  After eating some breakfast, we went for a walk while Ace rode along on his new bike.  I shot a lot of photos during this relatively short outing and I shared about two dozen photos here in another blog entry.   I decided to revisit all of those original photos that I captured that day to see if it would be worthwhile trying to put the photos together as individual frames of a video.  I actually got this idea for a video while looking at images of one of Kenzie's figure skating sessions.  As I was scrolling through these images, I noticed that when I scrolled through the photos quickly, it was just like watching an old home movie.  "Hmmmm....  I wonder if I can put these photo together as a video?" I opened up my video editing software to see i...

A ce just recently had his second birthday and Gee and Papa gave him a new bike for his birthday. We spent the whole day with Ace and Liza over the weekend.  All of us also spent the afternoon with the rest of the family at a local park.  Before we went to the park to meet with everyone else, we had some breakfast and then went for a walk while Ace rode along on his new bike.  He was pretty excited to be scooting around on his bike. Ace and I went out to the road while Gee finished up the breakfast dishes so I got a few photos of him before the four of us started on our trek around the park... When Gee and Liza were finally with us and ready to go, Ace seemed more interested in picking up small flowers and rocks.  He must have had a few of each in his pockets by the time we started on our walk around the park.  Liza must constantly find rocks in her washing machine! Ace has been watching Lukey pop wheelies on his bike and so this was Ace's version of popping whe...

One morning while Lukey and Kenzie were with us last week, Lukey and I decided to spend some time with my microscope.  Kenzie popped in and out of the room a few times but spent most of the morning in Gee's office playing with her dollhouse as Gee worked.  Kenzie and I had a few microscopy sessions together in the past but today was Lukey's turn.  Kenzie was welcome to join us but she preferred to stick close to Gee and her dollhouse.  My desk is set up with all sorts of monitors for different tasks sort of resembling my own little Command Center and one of these monitors would be used to display what was under the microscope.  On this morning, we had one of my Sony cameras mounted on the trinocular of the microscope.  I used the binocular eyepieces for setting up each specimen.  Lukey viewed what the camera was seeing on a 32 inch monitor over my desk.  The view through the binocular eyepieces is far crisper than what is seen on the big monitor b...

L ukey and Kenzie spent a few days with us last week during their break from school.  We had a good time with them and stayed pretty busy.  Gee had to work but I spent time doing activities with them each day.   Every now and then, Lukey and I will sit at the piano for a bit to do some improvisation and we did that again last week.  There is an audio clip, below, of our spur-of-the-moment ballad duet if you prefer to skip down to that so you can listen while you read the rest of this blog entry.   Lukey is now 10 years old and, although he has never had any true structured and regular lessons, he has an interest in the piano and sits at the piano to play at our house whenever possible.  Whenever I sit at the piano to play, he is quick to come over to the armchair right next to the piano so he can watch and listen.  In this way, he kind of reminds me of my cousin William.  William always sat right next to the piano whenever I played and h...

Back a month ago, we went to one of Lukey's hockey games at Stowe Arena.  After hockey, we all went to a local Christmas Tree farm to cut Christmas trees and then went out to lunch.  I'll write more and share more photos of the tree farm and lunch but this long overdue blog entry is about Lukey's hockey game. Lukey was in goal for this particular game and he did a good job.  It is funny, it seems like every time I started recording video, Lukey let up a goal!  I did happen to capture a few good saves by him but the video is a bit misleading.  He actually did have a lot of saves...  far more than goals scored against him.  Most importantly, Lukey had a great time in goal! So, here are a few photos from the game. At the bottom of the page, there is a short video too... It is difficult to spot at first but, in this photo below, Lukey blocked the shot with his right leg pad...  the hock...