Times are busy, busy, busy.   A good group of folks and myself have entered the 48 hour film contest in Des Moines.    Starting at 6:30 on Friday July 23 and running until 6:30 Sunday July 25, (48hours), our team, (and about 40 other teams in DSM) will write, shoot, and edit an 8-10 minute short film.  For the  next ten days we will be practicing writing, filming, lighting, and editing so that when the 23rd comes, we will be ready.  None of our practice stuff will make it into the film in any way, (that is the whole idea of everything happening in 48 hours).  However, these two clips are from a practice session last weekend.  ENJOY!

-Mark-

To re-iterate, these are practice sessions for acting, and camera angles and sound.  We have no idea what our genre or film will end up being.

This is William Elliott Whitmore singing “Black Iowa Dirt” at the 80-35 music festival in Des Moines over the Fourth of July weekend.  I recorded the audio separately and added some video from the festival to round out the four and a half minutes of video that I shot from this song.   Here is a link to his site

They are demolishing the old Polk County Jail.  Fun to watch.  I am working on a long video of NYC, and Washington D.C. expect it soon.

Friend of couchsurfing host, Indianapolis, Indiana.

These people look like they belong in a United Colors of Benneton ad.  They were just hangin out in Central Park.    This is a straight clip, no editing or color correcting.  Straight from the camera, web-u-lated and then posted.

HDR for photography is fantastic.    With it you can get anything from a subtle enhancement of an already great photo to a hyped up surreal acid-trip version of the real world.   

Video is just moving photography.   I took the Grays lake video and changed it all to still photos in a directroy (45oo stills in fact) I then converted them to HDR in Mediachances’s software Dynamic Photo HDR.   I set up a batch to do the same thing to all 4500 pictures.  I then imported them back into my editing software and made them back into a movie.  I edited out some parts of the original video because it did not all take well to the process.  This post represents the effort.

My next step is to shoot a video from the beginning with the idea that I am going to make it HDR.   There are just some subjects and shooting styles that will work very well with this technique.

The music for this video is Mellissa Hyman’s “Let Me Keep You”.

-Mark-

The music for the video is Justin Ewart’s  “In My Dream”.

-Mark-

Ok, so I took a ten second video clip, exported it as 300 seperate images, made them all hdr in photoshop, and then imported them back into a video.  I will be doing more projects like this.

Mark

This video was kind of funny anyway.  I used it to test a plan to make video into hdr video.  This was my first attempt!

Mark

Somebody, New Orleans, LA, Mardi Gras,

Over the last several years I have taken A LOT of photos. I have made many albums, usually realated to a certain trip, time, city, or event. They have been scattered far and wide.  Today, I made it a project to collect all of these into one spot. Over to the right of my site there is now a link to photography collections. People in the pictures have come and gone, but all have been part of my life.

Putting them all in one place has really made me reflect on the last year of my life.  It has been a transforming experience and like every year of my life it has gone by very quickly.  I will say that it is the first year in over ten years that I felt like I got a years’ worth of life out of the year that it cost me.

Feel free to look around…..

Mark

Zachary Miner, High School Graduation, 2010

Zach’s high school graduation was last night. It was a wonderful event. Zach has had a very illustrious high school career and it was a proud moment to watch him graduate. He is in National Honor Society and has many extra-curricular activities. He is very smart, and more importantly, he really likes working hard and keeping busy. I am a little biased, obviously, but I think that Zach is the one to watch…… 🙂

Mark Miner, Zachary Miner, Ray Miner, and Merle Miner, 2010

Dad is in town for Zach’s Graduation.

Gangsta, Miami Beach, 2010

This guy is permanently parked in front of a hotel in the Art Deco disctrict in Miami Beach. A stoic reminder of the mob money that built the whole area in the roaring twenties and thirties.

Space Shuttle Atlantis, fueled and ready for its last voyage, May 14, 2010

Today was one of those days that are almost beyond description.  I have been dreaming of going to a shuttle launch for five years at least.  I was in Miami last year and missed one by just a few days.  Since then I have been trying with some earnest to see a launch.  As you may or may not know, the shuttle program is coming to an end after just two more launches.  The program has been very successful over the last 30 years, but the fleet of shuttles is aging and the program is drawing to its inevitable conclusion.  With that in mind, I decided a couple of months ago to attend this launch of the Shuttle Atlantis on its last voyage into space.

Atlantis, moments after lift-off, May 14, 2010

Atlantis, Moments after lift-off, May 14, 2010, HDR

I have written in previous posts that I almost always couchsurf when I travel.  I love having a local person to stay with that knows the ropes and really understands where they live and what makes it special.  The accommodations for this trip was a wonderful person in Cape Canaveral named Kim.  We arrived at her place yesterday and within in a couple of minutes we were treated to the most wonderful surprise we could imagine.  Kim, our excellent couchsurfing host is an engineer for a company that is contracted by NASA.  She is an employee of the space center and as such has great access to the launch.  She took us out to get pictures last night and then took us to the causeway today for the main event.  (The causeway was the same spot that I had spent four hours trying to get tickets for.)  It was a wonderful day and it was very exciting to watch the Atlantis take-off.  Being with Kim was like having backstage passes to the best concert ever.  She was a wonderful host and it was an unbelievable day.  I took a lot of pictures, and these are my favorites so far……..

The launch was really spectacular.  The shuttle lept off the pad in a blaze of fire and smoke and a few minutes later the roar of the engines hit me in the middle of the chest and did not quit hitting.  The shuttle rose quickly into the sky.  It was easy to follow it until the separation of the solid rocket boosters and then it became a glowing dot in the sky that slowly disappeared, leaving an appreciative crowd (and Mark Miner) with a memory to last a lifetime.  Thanks, Kim for being so gracious and showing us such an incredible time.

Mark

This is our golden ticket.

Countdown to the launch. It is 9am here in Cape Canaveral. We have had breakfast and we are pumped for the launch. According to the news everything is a go at this point. We are going to head to the causeway around 10:30 for the 2:20 launch. Everyone is so excited here.

Mission Patch for STS-132

Every launch has a different logo or “Mission Patch”. this is the mission patch for this launch. (STS-132)

Night Before Shuttle Launch, May 2010

I am in Cape Canaveral. We have excellent tickets to the launch tomorrow courtesy of a wonderful couchsurfer here. It is the night before the launch. This photo was taken from approx 13 miles away, as close as we can get tonight. From this distance, the shuttle is just a small dot in the center of the frame. It has been greatly enlarged to make this picture. Tomorrow we will be on the causeway which is six miles from the shuttle. At that distance, the image will be four times larger in the camera than it is tonite.

This is the video that is currently playing at Sapphire Beach on Channel six.  It is 90 minutes long.   It was shot over the last three years.

-Mark-