Aaron Paul Vogel

I can't decide if my shoulders hurting is from all the bicycle riding I've been doing since coming home or left over from lugging 17 kilos (35 lbs) of backpack around most of Morocco. It's probably a little of both. Ever since I started traveling with my 1D Mark II and 17" Powerbook G4 I've bemoaned their heft. While the speed of the MKII and the wonderful screen real estate of the 17" served their purpose in the past, their weight and size are becoming cumbersome. Thus the reason for my recent bout of swapping out old gear for new.

I started writing this on the first day of the Platypus Workshop this last week, and this is how it started:

This is the first full day of the 2007 Platypus workshop and so far things are looking very good. There's twice as many people here as last year so they're working in groups of two or three. There aren't the same big names as last year - Drew Carey, David Frank, et al - but there are some very important names as far as we students are concerned. There's Joe Palmquist and Dan Pelle from the Spokesman Review, Morris, Max and Chris from Detriot News and Robert from the Indianapolis Star. All of these are big name places that would love to have a skilled college student come in for an internship, which could very easily turn into a job.

This first day is a pretty simple one: the morning started with classroom time discussing video, the implications of it, some of the technique and an introduction to the cameras the students will be using; the Canon XH-A1. After that the students are sent out to do a VOX POPS exercise and get lunch.

Peter Riley managed to get a job out of the deal, and a few of us got offers and made terrific contacts for the future. I think that having a TA movie night on the fifth night helped with that since we were able to get up in front of everyone and discuss what we'd done in the past and where we wanted to go in the future. We also got out t-shirt design from something PF said afterwards. PF is perhaps our biggest advocate and salesman. He was constantly pushing us and the attendees to talk and get to know each other and hopefully find a way to work together. He really wants to see us succeed which is nice to know.

I've decided that oil companies are like horny little middle school boys trying to get their sweaty hands up our financial skirts. They keep raising the prices until there's enough public outcry to be a problem, then drop them a little until we stop protesting. Then after a while they try again and get a little farther, then we push their hand away and they move it back, but just to our thigh... If this keeps up our wallets are gonna get date-raped.

I just spent about 4 hours video taping a panel of women artists talking about their work, the distance the womens' movement has come in the art world and basically just being inspiring to one another. It is nice to hear any kind of artist talk about their world, but this panel was particularly fun because I don't get enlightened, rational feminist viewpionts in my world most of the time. Not to say that the women in my world are unenlightened or irrational, just that we don't have the kind of conversations that these women have with each other. I also felt priveleged to be privy to a discussion I wouldn't be normally.

I shot second camera - roaming - for Sabine who some may remember I did audio for priviously. It was 3 hours of an ill-fitting Canon XL-2 on my shoulder. I know some of the shots are going to be shaky because that behemeoth (sp?) is a bear to hold steady while sitting down. And since I was at the front of the audience most of the time I was either on my butt or my knees. And oddly enough my right hand (on the grip) was the one that took the most burden against the hand strap. Griping about poor camera ergonomics aside I really enjoyed working with Sabine again on her doc and I enjoyed being "in" on things i'd never normally go out of my way for.

I spent about 3 hours playing with the Canon remote capture software today and decided it would be a good time to make the little humming bird that lives right outside our kitchen window play model. I put the camera on a tripod and a strobe on a light stand right next to it with a softbox on it. The strobe was needed as the light was going away really quickly. Though also it acted to stop the bird's motion quite well too. I was shooting it earlier but there wasn't as good a pose as I got here.

I'd also used a script I found online to watch the folder that the images were going into and copy them into the Aperture library when they appeared. I sat around for a little while waiting for the bird to show up again, and in the darkening light I saw it. I hit the space bar to take the image then switched over to Aperture and made a few adjustments before I used another plug-in to upload the image to Flickr.

The only sad part is that the Canon Window software, which would allow me to view exactly what's in front of the lens, allowing me to stay completely out of sight, doesn't seem to work with latest version of OS X. So I'll just have to wait until that's fixed to fully enjoy all that the software can do.

All in all, very fun.