Aaron Paul Vogel

I want to share with my initial readers - so, Joe, this is basically for you - some of the websites I'm drawing inspiration and know-how from. I spend an inordinate amount of time online or at my computer and thus I tend to surf around a lot just clicking links, doing Google searches and reading things I come across. I also spend a lot of time listening to NPR in my car and I'll often voice memo web addresses I hear during interesting stories, which I then later take a look at. Here's a brief list of the places I've been surfing lately:

The Spokesman Review

Colin Mulvany over at the Spokesman Review has been doing multimedia (Sound Slides and video) since May and his work is really inspiring.

The Mercury News

The Mercury News in San Jose, Calif., has a ton of Sound Slide shows up on their website. It's fairly well done as far as layout goes and the photos are terrific, as is most of the audio

Multimedia Journalism: Joe Weiss

Joe Weiss' blog has lots of links to multimedia on the web that I wouldn't find on my own, so I check his blog at least once a week to see what I've missed.

Unembedded

Unembedded isn't a multimedia presentation, but the images are terrific, and the Flash-based website is very well done. I'm more interested

Transom

Transom.org has kind of a mess of interesting audio stories and helpful articles for those interested in creating audio for radio or the web.

Third Coast Festival

The Third Coast Festival is an annual radio industry gathering in Chicago, Ill. It includes awards for the year's best radio documentaries, which are then featured on the website. This is truly amazing audio. I've been inspired a lot by radio programs lately, particularly This American Life and All Things Considered.

NPR : Gregory Crewdson's Photo Alchemy You all should check out this article about photographer Gregory Crewdson. While it's not my style of photography I can certainly appreciate the aesthetic of his images. The vivid colors and intricate sets are simply amazing.

By buddy Joseph Hollack alerted me to Interactive Narratives a while back, but Joe's last blog update got to me to actually listen to IN's podcast. For people that are interested in the new media that is developing in the journalism world IN and it's podcast seem to be a terrific place to find out what other people - those who are actually creating the content and those that are watching the future - are thinking about all this. Take a look and a listen and let me know what you think. I'll be adding a link to the podcast to my own site.

The latest podcast is an interview with Travis Fox of WashingtonPost.com. The photo and multimedia part of the site is one of the most developed in the world as far as aesthetic of the presentation and the quality of the work. Of course being the Post they should be since they have more informational resources available to them than probably any other printed news source in the world. Fox just returned from Aceh, Indonesia where he was working on a video project about the anniversary of the tsunami that hit that region a year ago.

I was browsing through the site just now and came across this article about wet darkrooms and how, despite digital's incursion into every facet of photography, they are still popular with so many, particularly young students of photography. Very much worth a read. Despite being a technophile I'm still very much in love with wet darkrooms. I love the ease and detail with which I can tone in Photoshop, but for sheer physical pleasure nothing stands up to the smell of developer watching a print appear on a blank sheet of paper; as if by magic. I know that I for one will be teaching kids - maybe mine, maybe someone else's - the joys of the wet darkroom at some point in my life.

Better Writing Through Radio Pt. I This is a very interesting article that has some terrific technique tips that apply not only to radio reporters but reporters in general. Her first four points are speaking to me particularly loudly right now. They are, in brief:

• Over-report
• Save your emails
• Save earlier drafts / make an "OUTS" page
• Make lists

"I always reach a point, in reporting a story, where I feel like I'm finished. I feel this finished-ness very strongly, and it makes me want to stop interviewing immediately and go home."

I stumbled on this wonderful site done by the Magnum photo agency as I was looking through Slate.com's Today's Pictures section - which is another great find in it's own right. Today's Pictures is a daily set of images taken by Magnum photographers. In addition, new photo essays from Magnum In Motion are posted as well. Both sites are worth visiting, but if you're particularly interested in the interactive essays take a look at Magnum In Motion first. There's an incredible back log of work there. Also, take a look at the Previous Days drop down menu on the left-hand side of Today's Pictures Dec. 1st, 2005 and Dec. 2nd, 2005 kicked off the new section with some classic photographs from Magnum's history - the very first on Dec. 1st being my personal favorite by Henri Cartier-Bresson

Well it's been an incredibly long time since I've updated, and I don't really have anything of terrible interest for you even now. However, I wanted to let everyone know why I've been lax in updated, and that's because I've been working hard on creating a new design for the Brooks NPPA website. The new site isn't up yet, but one of the new features is: our podcast. At the moment we only have a few items up - one of them being an interview we did with photographer Joachim Ladefoged, which I engineered - though there's more to come in the future so subscribe now.

As for me I'll be putting some new stuff up soon. I'm taking MPV261, the second level video class here at Brooks. I'm working on a number of projects I think will be very interesting so stay tuned. I'll be posting them soon!

I ran across this article on PDNonline about the practice of using video frame grabs in newspapers. As I've made clear in a previous post, I'm unimpressed with all the Chicken Littles running around shouting about the end of the still camera in journalism. While I'm impressed with the quality HD video cameras are achieving, I still have major issues with them as still cameras with "the fastest motor drive in the country." Fortunately the article isn't one of those "sky is falling" types, and presents both sides of the discussion. A good read, and some interesting examples - the best I've seen so far - of good still grabs and what are some useful applications of this new ability.

I'd like to point those of you with or considering what seems like a complicated audio setup to a not so new freeware program called Soundflower made by Cycling '74. I'd found this program a while ago when I was looking for recording solutions when making calls with Skype, but for one reason or another couldn't get my head around how it works.

Now, for whatever reason, I've finally managed to get a couple of different computers here at The Bee setup with Soundflower. The first computer I setup was in the podcasting room. The Bee has a Mac Mini setup with three Blue USB microphones in a small, soundproofed room that they've used off and on for different podcasts. I setup Skype and Garageband to record telephone interviews for reporters. Without the aid of another USB interface to plug the output of Skype through (let alone free USB port on the back of the Mini) I used Soundflower and an aggregate audio device to simply re-route Skype's output audio to an input in Garageband.

I'd like to draw your attention to the below video. I found it on YouTube through a link posted in the SportsShooter.com forums. It's a music video from what I gather is a German singer. The video was done by Hagen Decker, a German director and shot entirely with a Canon 1D MKIII. It's a fascinating study of what can be done with the amazing tools that we as creative people have a our command. Watch and enjoy!

If you haven't heard of Discovery Channel's hit show Deadliest Catch you're clearly not paying attention to some of the only good television on these days. I'll spare the details for those of you in the know, and give everyone else a link to check it out for themselves: Deadliest Catch on Discovery. take a look and come back.

Well, it turns out that the brave souls who started and continue to film (they have extra camera now, but continue to work themselves) the show are Sacramento locals. Well, relatively local. One lives in Auburn and the other in Lotus. Sac Bee did a story on Doug and Todd Stanley a couple weeks ago. I'm praying I can talk to the guys about what they do, and maybe, just maybe, get them to come out and talk to Brooks NPPA about their gig. That would be amazing.

Below you'll find what I believe will ultimately be the final way that I host and post my videos to the web. The solution is, unfortunately, still a version of hand-coding in that I encode the FLV files using a program on my computer, then upload that file to my hosting server and use a pre-created SWF file and some special embed code to actually play the FLV file. Sadly I've yet to find a sharing/hosting service that can cleanly and reliably share my files. While I lose out on potential views from traffic coming from the sharing site, I have very good control over the way my video plays on my website. Ultimately I'm happiest this way, but I'm amazed that with all the options available out there for video sharing, this is still no high quality, flexible and simple site: no one site has managed to do it all.

What you see below is my Profiles in Composition video encoded using the On2 Flix Standard program. It is a $39 standalone program that does nothing else than encode video to FLV files using the On2 VP6 codec, which, at the moment, is the highest quality FLV codec available. In the future this same program, or the next version of it, will be support the H.264 codec, which is even better for getting quality at low file sizes. Once the FLV file is created I upload it and use the JW FLV Player rather than going through Flash to create a player. This is a nice, FREE, way to embed FLV video without having Flash. There's even a wizard on the website that will create the embed code for you and a javascript that will cleanly deal with users who don't have the most recent Flash Plugin installed. It's far more advanced than anything I could come up with on my own.

This is a good news / bad news item for myself, though I hope it's good news for everyone else. I just today downloaded Google's new Google Updater software for my Blackberry Pearl. I've been using the Gmail and Google Maps mobile software for some time and have absolutely loved them. With the new Updater software I found that not only were there terrific new updates for these two programs but a slew of other new programs are now available. The best of these new offering, IMHO, is Google Sync.

For a few months now I've been using a combination solution to get my Google Calendar schedule to sync with my Blackberry's calendar software. Two things, service at Goosync.com - which I believe will now be rendered completely useless - and a little piece of client software called SyncJe, were handling the syncing of my main calendar, while other calendars (birthdays, holidays, etc) were being ignored due to the crippled service Goosync.com provided for free. I had to pay $30 for the SyncJe client so I certainly wasn't going to pay a ludicrously large monthly free to Goosync.com just to sync a few more calendars.

I have to say that I've been happy enough with the service of this combination. However, when offered something better for free, I'm not one to pass it up.

So in comes Google with - finally - their own direct sync client that, gasp, syncs as many of your calendars to your phone as you like! There have been reported bugs, though the only one I've personally experienced has to do with recurring events in GCal showing up as single events in my Blackberry. But that's a minor nuisance I'm hopeful Google will correct. The other down side for many is that the service is only compatible with Blackberry devices, so sorry all you Palm, and mobile phone users.

So, for those of you with Blackberry devices and Google Calendars I highly suggest you check out Google Sync to get yourself synced up! Oh, and the bad news, in case you missed it, is that I just a couple months ago PAID for a service I could have waited for to get free. Oh well.

Riddle me this. Who's corporate rule book do you think this quote comes from:

"Rule #1: Use your best judgment.

"Rule #2: See Rule 1.

"That's it. That is the one hard and fast rule. Unless a serious mistake was made when you were hired, you have pretty good judgment."