Friday Night Videos

Ashley MacIsaac may be a unstable loon, but his musical talent is undeniable. His instincts for fusing traditional fiddling with modern riffs and arrangements is spot-on. His version of the chestnut "Sleepy Maggie" is about 57 shades of awesome, and Mary Jane Lamond's Gaelic vocals are the cherry on top. Enjoy.



Previously on Friday Night Videos... Poison.

Now Playing: Clandestine The Ale is Dear

Insects up close

I inherited a manual Nikon 50mm AI-s lens from my late father-in-law, and have used it on my Canon with a reversing ring for a DIY macro lens. Recently, I added a Vivitar 2x telextender (which I got from my brother who wasn't using it) to the assembly, and have been pleased with the results. Yes, that fast 1.8 Nikon lens loses two stops and is much darker and slower with the telextender, but I'm able to get significantly larger magnifications with it. As long as I shoot in bright daylight, I can stop down to f/8 or even f/11 for a decent depth-of-field.



So, yeah, I've been playing with macro again. Took some shots in Columbus over the weekend, and yesterday ventured into the backyard after work. I'm generally pleased with the results. At these magnifications, there's some blur due to camera shake, but it's not terribly visible unless the images are blown up quite large. Once I actually get a real macro lens, with autofocus and perhaps built-in image stablization to control camera shake, I might be able to do some real damage.





Now Playing: Brian Wilson Imagination

Yes, but can he dance?

Somebody arrived at my blog today by Googling the term "Howard Waldrop funky chicken."

Damn, I love the internets!

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Peter S! Beagle

A few weeks ago, I got an email from some friends up in the DFW area asking if I was going to make it to Scarborough Fair this year for Peter S. Beagle's appearance. Now, I'm a big fan of Scarborough Faire. I used to get season passes for it, and occasionally attended dressed in my Hern the Hunter outfit. I took The Wife there on our first date, as she'd never been to one before. She married me anyway (and no, I've never been in SCA. I'm not that serious about ren faires and such--I just get a kick out of them). But since we've moved to New Braunfels, Scarborough's become a 4-hour-plus drive to attend, which A) means a lot of driving for the kids and/or B) hotel expenses, which we're never all that fond of in the first place. So no, I regretfully said, we'd not be making it despite Peter Beagle's presence.

I checked around and discovered Beagle was making a book tour of Texas, and would be hitting some bookstores in the San Antonio-Austin area before heading up to Scarborough. Unfortunately, we were going to be out of town during his events and would miss him. I've met Beagle several times--even interviewed him at Apollocon in '05 I believe--and have had all sorts of fascinating conversations with him on those occasions, so I was disappointed to miss him. Then, Friday night, The Wife gets and unexpected email inviting us to a friend's house Sunday evening for a small party/reception for Beagle at which he'd also do a reading. Just like that, we were seeing Beagle and not even having to make the drive into San Antonio.


Peter S. Beagle reads "Gordon, the Self-Made Cat" to
Monkey Girl and Fairy Girl April 5 in New Braunfels


We arrive and the kids pile out of the minivan and immediately start playing with the other children there on the swingset/playscape. There's a little party tent set up with Beagle's books available to buy, and another table with wine, cheese, fruit and other goodies. Connor Cochran, Beagle's business manager, looks up and is startled to see me. Most folks assume I live in Austin since those are the writers circles I mostly move in. I move along and greet Beagle, and immediately get drawn in to a great conversation with him on how this is his first extended stay in Texas that doesn't involve airports or convention hotels adjacent to airports, and how his vision of Texas was forever colored by the descriptions of a fellow creative writing student at Stanford by the name of Larry McMurtry. Then Beagle got ready to do his reading.

If you've never heard Beagle read, you're missing out on a great treat. His voice is resonant and velvety smooth. It's not particularly loud, but it carries all the same. There's a even calm to it that packs an emotional power all the same. I make no secret of the fact that if my career ever reaches the point where audiobooks become an issue, I'm going to request that the publisher hire Peter Beagle to do the readings. For this kid-friendly gathering, he chose to read "Gordon, the Self-Made Cat" from his collection The Line Between. It was quite a funny piece about a mouse who defies convention and attends cat school so that he will no longer be a prey animal. It was cute and clever in all the right ways without being cloying. Beagle announced that he was working to expand it--presumably to become a full-fledged children's novel--and both The Wife and I thought it particularly well-suited for a cinematic adaptation, possibly by Jim Henson Productions or a similar studio capable of animated animals and wry humor. We'll see.

My eldest, Monkey Girl, was particularly captivated. She'd met Beagle before and knew him as the guy who wrote The Last Unicorn, but that was pretty much the extend of her interest. In the last year, however, she's become a Reader. In a few short months she progressed from the Junie B. Jones books to Judy Blume to A Series of Unfortunate Events. Late Friday night, right around midnight, she finished off Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, completing the entire Potter series in a five-week span. And she wanted something else to read, preferably a series. Drawing a blank on an appropriate follow up to the boy wizard, and not that big into series books, I suggested both Asimov's Foundation books and McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern. Neither piqued Monkey Girl's interest. But Beagle's reading did. She begged for us to buy her some books, and in the end settled on Tamsin and Beagle's new collection We Never Talk About My Brother. And she got Beagle to autograph them, listening intently as he discussed the origins of the cats in Tamsin. Mr. Beagle, I'm confident in saying, has won himself a fan for life. She read Tamsin all the way home. Later, I found the book in the living room and took it upstairs to her room. Later I found her curled up in her room with The Fantasy Worlds of Peter S. Beagle open. I'd gotten it autographed for her back at that Apollocon.

"What are you reading?" I asked.

"Lila the Werewolf," she answered. "I can't find Tamsin."

"It's on your bed. I found it in the living room earlier."

"It is?" Swoop!

Yeah, I'd say Beagle's got himself a new fan.

Now Playing: The Kinks Everybody's in Show-Biz

Bluebonnet shoot

The Wife had a photo workshop Sunday, a "trash-the-dress" style bridal shoot in a bluebonnet field in Brenham. This is in support of her nascent photography business, Lisa on Location. The general concept behind this kind of photography workshop is that photographers pay a modest participation fee and, after a minimal amount of tips and photographic instruction from the event organizers, are turned loose to flex their picture-taking prowess on a bevy of models assembled for said event. The "trash the dress" aspect involves shooting the bride in informal situations where the dress isn't kept in a necessarily pristine condition. In real life, such "trash the dress" shoots are normally scheduled some time after the wedding, for obvious reasons.

This was a homecoming of sorts for The Wife, since her first job out of college was working for the Brenham Banner-Press. She doesn't hold a wealth of fond memories for the job (although I did learn--much to my surprise after 13 years of marriage--that she is the reporter who broke the story of Blinn College disbanding its national champion track team) which ended after approximately a year when the publisher eliminated her position in order to buy himself a new car. Yeah.

So she and I get up absurdly early to make out way to Brenham, leaving the kids in the care of a grandmother. We arrive as the sun is peeking above the trees, and are heartened somewhat by the fact the fields are more scenic than Google maps had led us to believe (they were bordered on three sides by Wal Mart, Home Depot and La Quinta, you see). There are roughly 15 models total, but it was hard to tell since many listed online as attending didn't show, and some who showed were never listed as participating. On top of this, only four or so women in their early 20s were actually modeling in wedding dresses. There were a number of teens who weren't doing wedding dresses, and the bulk of the models present were younger children available for family and youth bluebonnet shots. The one thing The Wife doesn't have need for at this point is kid portraits--she's already got far more than she can use on her website, and as it can be time-consuming working with children, ultimately that part just wasn't worth the hassle, so she ended up with relatively few kid shots.

The ratio of models to photographers, as stated by the event organizers, was roughly 1:1. But the bulk of these were children, and some of the children were siblings and a package deal. As the event was billed as a bridal shoot, guess what the bulk of the photographers were primarily interested in shooting? Four models in wedding gowns had clusters of photographers swarming them most of the time, stepping over each other and generally trying to stake out a good angle for the shot they wanted. That's not to say that the participating photogs weren't polite or professional. There were some good conversations to be had and most folks were in a good humor throughout the day. But it quickly became apparent that if you weren't aggressive, you wouldn't get your shots. The models responded to the loudest commands, and any photog meekly waiting their turn would get trumped by the next person with a camera that asserted themselves. Judging from the number of wedding dresses that were waiting to be worn in the dressing area, along with the number of adult models listed as attending but nowhere to be seen, it's hard to blame the organizers. I've dealt with scheduling models a fair bit in recent months, and "flakes"--that is, cancellations or no-shows--run about 50 percent. Apparently there are a lot of people who like to play at being models, but when it comes time to actually roll out of bed at 7 a.m., they'd rather just hit the snooze button.

I, by the way, wasn't shooting. The Wife had registered for the workshop, not I. Instead, I was relegated to the role of "Lensboy," packing the equipment, holding the reflector, offering suggestions and anything else that needed doing. As I'm holding the reflector to soften the shadows on one model's face, I commented to The Wife that it was interesting we had bright morning sunlight when the weather forecast had indicated it'd be overcast that day. Cue gale-force winds and heavy cloud cover. Temperatures dropped about 10 degrees, and what had started out as a balmy, breezy day quickly turned chill. The clouds acted a great light diffusers, but The Wife wanted a warmer look to the shots, so I held the gold reflector up as she bounced the on-camera flash off it. The effect was muted but perceptible. Of immediate concern to myself was the inclination of the huge reflector panel I was holding to whip off into the sky, kite-like, never to be seen again. The models had it worse, though. Those with long hair--ie most of them--fought a losing battle to keep it out of their faces. And pretty much all of them were wearing short, summer weather outfits that offered little protection against the chill weather. A few models simply packed it in once wind picked up and temperatures dropped. I can't say I blame them. Then, after an hour or so, the clouds abruptly rolled away and the brilliant sun came out again to screw up everyone's white balance. It didn't get any warmer, though.

It was interesting to observe the other photographers, as I was able to do since I wasn't shooting. The majority of photogs were shooting Canon, with Nikon, not surprisingly, making up the rest. I didn't see a singly Olympus, Pentax or Sony, which surprised me a little. Those other brands are distant also-rans behind the Big Two in terms of market share, but I know there are lots of photographers who use them to great effect in their photography. Just none who attended this workshop, apparently. I observed an array of Canon's top-of-the-line L series lenses in action, a smattering of mid-grade consumer glass and some basic kit lenses. One Canon shooter had a big Sigma telephoto zoom she was using. When I asked her about it, she got defensive, saying she couldn't afford the equivalent Canon lens and moved off before I could say anything else. I've been looking at Sigma's massive 150-500mm super zoom telephoto lens, mainly because there's noting else comparable to it and the price makes it attractive. I wanted to talk with the Sigma owner about her experiences with image quality and autofocus with her telephoto zoom, but obviously never got a chance. Rats.

Ultimately, we shot for two and a half hours, and The Wife got scads of good bridal portraits, a few glamour-style shots, some excellent senior portrait-style shots and a handful of kid shots taken when none of the older models were available. All in all, it was an interesting experience, and an educational one. We'd never participated in anything like this, and likely won't ever do a bridal again, although it could be fun for other specific themes (I know a few months back there was a pirate-themed shoot in Galveston on the tall ship Elissa). My biggest regret is that I didn't get to shoot any myself, but such is the lot of Lensboy.

Now Playing: Various artists Celtic Moods

Friday Night Videos

I never much cared for Poison. Of all the 80s hair bands, they struck me as more style than substance, playing at being hard rockers more than they actually were simply because they lacked the imagination to do anything else. Certainly, much of their music and lyrics were on the simplistic side. Thus it's all the more baffling why I found their album "Open Up and Say... Ahh!" so entertaining. Perhaps most surprising is the fact that I actually prefer their cover of Loggins & Messina's "Your Mama Don't Dance" to the original. Amazing.

The video's pretty run-of-the-mill, though. Can't have everything.



Previously on Friday Night Videos... Supertramp.

Now Playing:

Mind Meld

For some unfathomable reason, the folks over at SF Signal asked me to participate in their Mind Meld feature again. It's almost like they didn't learn their lesson last time. This week's subject matter is the series finale to Battlestar Galactica. What did yours truly think about it?

Magic happened. And not the good kind that flows from the pen of a writer on a roll. The sloppy kind that leads to Ships of Light and Robbie Rist in Lennon specs shepherding the survivors of humanity into a soft white future filled with hi-key lighting. Only we didn't get Ships of Light in Daybreak part 1, 2 or 3. Heck, we didn't even get Robbie Rist (and seriously, how much could he have cost?).

And there's more where that came from. Oh, and be sure to read Chris Roberson's evisceration of the series. It's what I'd have written were I more capable of good word-using.

Now Playing: Aerosmith Pandora's Box