Big Adventure: The Routeburn Track

Just back from the Routeburn Track and waiting for our rental car. Too exhausted to write much so I'll let the pictures do the talking...  

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Lake McKenzie at Dusk

Lake McKenzie at Dusk

Dinner at the McKenzie hut

Dinner at the McKenzie hut

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Routeburn Falls hut, day 2

Routeburn Falls hut, day 2

Start of day 3. 

Start of day 3. 

Ride back to Queenstown  

Ride back to Queenstown  

Most of the pictures I took during this trip were on my DSLR. I'll try to upload them when I get home.

Big Adventure: The Long Haul to Queenstown

We hadn't yet left LA for Auckland when I began to wrap my head around what I was about to do to my body. I was already feeling jet-lagged from an earlier than usual east coast departure, and the thought of spending another 14 hours on planes seemed awful. Much to my surprise I fell asleep shortly after the in flight meal and woke up with 4 hours left to Auckland. We arrived just after 5 am, and made a few mistakes navigating between the terminals. Now we're settling into Queenstown, and best of all...getting showers! 

I love watching Capri sketch. 

I love watching Capri sketch. 

Crossing the southern alps on our approach to Queenstown. 

Crossing the southern alps on our approach to Queenstown. 

So far this year...

Lots of changes this year, and lots to look forward to.  In one of my last posts I laid out some creative plans and goals for 2017.  Most of those are out the window or really, really behind schedule already.  That having been said, 2017 holds several new additions to the families of my wife and I.  My brother and sister-in-law are expecting their first child, which gave me my first opportunity to try out maternity photography a few weeks ago.  I gave it a go after a few quick tips from my excellent photographer friend Natalie and some internet recommendations. 

I had to include one picture of my dog-in-law as well.

Last Post of 2016

This will be my last blog post of 2016, and fourth post this month.  Hopefully I’ll keep up the writing in the new year.  2016 has been a pretty eventful year.  I’ve seen a lot of people wishing it would come to an end either because of the ugly election cycle or the loss of famous figures, but this year has been special for me.  In April I proposed to my then girlfriend, and after a short four-month engagement we were married at the end of July.  She pulled off a beautiful wedding.  Had I fully appreciated the stress planning her dream wedding would entail, I probably would have proposed in 2015.  Now as we close out 2016, I can only begin to appreciate the ways she is enriching my life, and I look forward to continuing our adventures in 2017.

Some other things that happened this year include filming two weddings, making a Kickstarter video for Hegemony Technologies, video documenting the adventures of Austin and Björn, and converting my charcoal BBQ into a portable pizza oven (thanks, Gabe!).

In 2016 I read:

  • The Last Lion (I finished this epic 3 book biography of Winston Churchill)
  • The Decisive Battles of World History (part of The Great Courses series)
  • Target Tokyo (The story of the Doolittle raid, and the Japanese reprisals against China)
  • Rebel Yell (The biography of Stonewall Jackson, excellent read)
  • Church History in Plain Language (An overview of church history from Jesus to present day)
  • Dead Wake (The Lusitania's final Atlantic crossing, and America’s entrance into WWI)
  • Bonhoeffer (The biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, finished today!)

New Year’s Resolution for 2017: Finish more projects than I start!

2016 was a busy year, so much so that I have projects from 2015 to finish.  This year my goal is to check off those personal projects before dreaming up new ones to start.  My wife made this recommendation to me, and I’ve turned it into my resolution.  It also serves as a sneak peak into what I hope to share on my website in the coming year.  So here is the list for 2017:

1. Three Wedding Videos.  I love filming wedding videos for my friends and family; editing them is a different story!  So now I find myself with three videos to finish before I take on anymore!

2. Family videos of Austin and Björn.  After Austin was born I did a pretty good job editing and uploading little videos of his first year of life.  I dropped the ball when Björn came along.  I’m sitting on a back log of footage of my nephews that I would like to share.  My sister has been nagging me for this year's Thanksgiving video.

3. Iceland Roadtrip.  I’ve been meaning write about my trip to Iceland in September of 2015 since the weekend after I got back.  I've started to work on a series of blog posts to detail the trip and to showcase the pictures that I took.  Some of these pictures have already made it onto my website.

4. Silly Sheep. I hope to continue where I left off in the new year.  My goal is to finish the model of Dandelion in January and begin working on several of the other sheep models.  The first of these will be "Gus", the ram.

I think that is all of the side projects I've got going.  Plenty to keep me busy in the time I have to spare!

Silly Sheep: Part 3 (Revisiting an old project)

Took me a while to get this posted because of the holidays.  About a week ago I decided it was time to revisit my Blender 3D model “Dandelion”.  For those of you unfamiliar with Blender, it’s a free 3D modeling program.  The learning curve is fairly steep, but the creative possibilities abound.  I first started working on this model in December of 2014, around the same time I met the girl who would become my wife.  At that time, my nephew Austin was tiny.  This project was meant to be part of a book for Austin I planned to call “Silly Sheep”.  The project got pushed to the back burner, and in the past two years I’ve made very little progress on any aspect of the book.  Austin is getting big fast and has a little brother called Björn now.  I get the feeling that even if I stick with it, this book won’t be done before Austin and Bjorn are too big to enjoy it.  Maybe it will be for my own kids or someone else’s.  

My progress as of January 2015

I had a look at the model again about a week ago.  I wasn’t very happy with the “wool” on Dandelion.  It looked a whole lot more like rough fur, so I looked around on the internet to see if there were any new wool examples in the greater Blender Community.  There wasn’t much to be found since the model of Franck, the suicidal sheep in the Blender Foundation’s short film, “Cosmos Laundromat”.

Blender Foundation's Franck Sheep

More recently, Disney’s Zootopia came out with a proprietary software plugin for the 3D program Maya, which allowed them to render highly complex fur and wool simulations as seen below.

From the Engadget article found here

From the Engadget article found here

Looking at the image I saw something my model was lacking.  The image on the left gave me some ideas.  You can see a black and white texture on the left.  I realized they were using it to control the length and shape of the cracks between the tufts of wool. It’s a perlin noise texture.  Perlin noise was created in 1983 to create more natural looking computer graphics.  A close look at sheep’s wool also reveals the pattern of a voronoi diagram.  Voronoi patterns are found all throughout nature, you probably look at them all the time without realizing it.  
Interesting fact: In 1854 John Snow created a voronoi diagram from a map of a London neighborhood afflicted with cholera.  He observed that the victims had been getting their water from the broad street pump; removing the pump’s handle halted the epidemic.  
Now I’ve digressed.  I played around with Blender’s hair physics for a while, but wasn’t happy with the results.  I also discovered that my dandelion model was scaled in Blender units.  Converting to imperial measurements I was working with a sheep about 250 feet tall.   So I'm reworking my wool material and getting the scaling right before I move on.  Here are some of my iterations.  I used the final image for my nephew's third birthday card.

Hopefully they’ll be some more progress with the book in the new year!  

Olympians in the living room

Every year I like to work on a few commercial video projects.  This post is a bit of a behind the scenes look at the video I created for the "Rowing App".  

Equipment Used:

Software Used:

This project was especially fun because it combines two of my great loves: video and rowing.  The video was for my friend Paul who started Hegemony Technologies and needed a video to promote his cell phone app called "The Rowing App".   I rowed with Paul for years in Sacramento and was excited to be working with him.  I also got the chance to work with Seth, an old teammate from my brief rowing career at UC Davis.  Seth was in the final stages of preparing for the 2016 Rio Olympics (he stroked the US Men's Four a couple of months after we finished filming the project).  I also got to meet and work with Esther Lofgren, a 2012 gold medalist in the US women's eight. Rather than tell you what The Rowing App is, let me show you the video we made if you haven't seen it yet:    

I worked with Hegemony Technologies to deliver a video of equal (or greater) quality for a third of the price they had been quoted by another video production company.  Scheduling time to film around Seth's training and the local spring regattas presented a challenge.  Borrowing a launch for filming and a boat for Seth and his friend Ambrose to row was also tricky.  Throwing a rainy spring into the equation stretched out filming over about a month.  We ended up filming all of the land scenes and speaking parts in my house.  I set up a simple three-point lighting setup and backdrop in my living room for the interviews and pretended my kitchen was Seth's home.  I got some much needed help from my then fiancé.  I gave her a crash course in boom mics and audio recording.  She did a great job, and freed me up to focus on filming.  For cameras I used my Canon 5D MKIII with Magic Lantern firmware and my Blackmagic Design Pocket Cinema Camera.  I used Veydra mini primes and a Canon 70-200 F2.8 lens to get nice crisp images with bokeh backgrounds.  I filmed the entire project in RAW which generated a ton of data, 764 gigabytes of hard drive space when all was said and done!  The final video file was just over three minutes long, about 500 megabytes in size.  Even though it fills up storage, I'm addicted to filming in RAW.  With video that looks as crisp as my still photos, I won't be going back to the H.264 video codec any time soon.  Below are some fuzzy cell phone pictures of the interviews and a little video of some of the footage that didn't make the cut.

NOte: If you invite Olympians into your house, be sure to have enough food to feed them!  I had a poorly stocked pantry that morning and was only able to offer Seth and Esther PB&J sandwiches and a half bag of stale tortilla chips (which Seth devoured).

In the video above you see a few shots from our first attempt to film the rowing scenes for the video.  We ended up scrapping all of these shots which were filmed on a Friday afternoon in Princeton.  We were trying to take advantage of a gap in Seth's schedule, but there was too much noisy activity at the boathouse and the afternoon sun produced a harsh light that wasn't the look I was going for.  That Friday filming session was useful because it gave me a chance to practice filming from the launch.  We decided to film the rowing sequences one last time on Sunday morning.  The morning was overcast with drizzling rain and flat water - great rowing weather!  The grey clouds produced even lighting and rain created a nice atmosphere.  Seth and Ambrose were well rested and having a good time.  I laid out over the front of the launch with my camera a few inches above the water and captured some of my favorite rowing shots ever.  After filming I finished up the app animations in After Effects, mixed the audio in Audition, and gave the final video a color treatment in Film Convert.   

Filming in RAW produces great images.  Some of these shots were used on the Hegemony Technologies website:

http://therowingapp.com/

Here is a link to Esther Lofgren's website: http://www.estherlofgren.com/

Need a short video for your business or brand?  I'd love to hear about it!  Drop me a note in the comments below.  Thanks for reading my blog!

Norcal Honeymoon

It's been a lot longer since my last post than I had hoped, but here is a post for anyone who may still be visiting the site.  I knew I would have a lot less free time as a married man.  I guess I thought I would have more than I do...  Obviously it's worth it.  My married life is so much more fulfilling than my single life.  This isn't a post on adjusting to married life though, it's a post about those first few wonderful days together at the start of our new adventure.  

I hadn't given much thought to where I would like to honeymoon with Capri.  I actually had a list of all the places I didn't want to go and all the things I didn't want to do.  You know, all the things most people include in their honeymoons.  No offense if you like cruises or lounging under palm trees at the beach.  That's just not my cup of tea.  Capri made planning a good deal easier when she said she wanted to see northern California.  The greater Sacramento area had been my home for over 6 years, during and after graduate school at UC Davis.  My experience in "Norcal" shaped most of my early adulthood, and Capri wanted to see it.  I had spoken so much about it during the time we dated.  So together we made plans to see some of my old haunts, and some places new to both of us.  

Escape from wedding planning

After a long week of being busy during the day at work and busy at night planning, Capri and I went for a nice little outing at Longwood Gardens.  All week Longwood had been promoting their spring blooms on the radio, but I didn't think it was going to be a good idea to try to cram one more thing into our busy schedules.  Thanks to a change in filming plans this weekend I was able to fulfill a promise to the girl I love.  Spring time is her favorite season, and it was really fun to able to take a break for a few hours and enjoy it with her.  

I got a bit carried away with the tulips...

Björn's First Thanksgiving

Its been a long time since I've updated my site.  In the hopes of easing myself back into semi-regular posting I thought I would start with something easy like pictures and video from our Thanksgiving meal.  This was my first trip home since my newest little nephew was born and my first Thanksgiving with my girlfriend, so there were lots of fun pictures to take.  On that note, I'll let the pictures and video tell the rest of the story!  

Springtime in the valley

Some pictures and sounds from a wonderful weekend at my family's home in Path Valley, PA.  

My first wedding...video shoot

Oh boy, I'm way behind on my blog posting.  I wanted to get this one up before its old news.  This weekend I had the pleasure of filming my first wedding video for my sister-in-law's sister (I've said "sister-in-law's sister" more times than I can count in the last two weeks!).  I'll post the actual video later but for now I wanted to post some of the pictures I snapped in between filming video.  

I shot all my video as RAW image sequences at 23.976 frames per second which gobbled up 142 GB of memory card on my Canon 5DMK3 and Black Magic Pocket Cinema Camera.  I used a Canon 70-200 F2.8 for most of my video and stills.  My computer is churning out the extracted files right now, and I'm pretty excited by what I see.  More to come soon (video stills, etc)...I hope!  Thanks Dana and Dan for being my guinea pigs and trusting me with your wedding video!  

The worm photoshoot

Its been a long, cold and busy winter (I'll believe spring is here when I see it)...but its also been a very happy and productive time in my life.  I just haven't been able to sit still long enough to share it with you.

If you were hoping for another Silly Sheep post, fear not, another one is in the works with some updates.  Today I wanted to write a post about another topic which is near and dear to my heart: BioLogic Company.  BioLogic is the company that my father and mother started in the basement of my grandparents house back in 1985.  Through lots of hard work that little company has slowly grown, and is stronger than ever today.  BioLogic produces and sells beneficial nematodes, microscopic roundworms that hunt down and kill pest insects in the soil.  These beneficial nematodes are a green alternative to chemical pesticides.  Besides being safe for people, pets, and plants, our nematodes actively hunt down pests for months after application and pest insects won't develop resistance to them.  My little brother, mother, and little sister carry are the backbone of Biologic.  I still enjoy the small part I play in designing product packaging and generating some of the advertising media.  

Early in the year I sent to work creating images for our Amazon product line.  It wasn't much fun at the time.  If you've ever purchased something on Amazon, you may have noticed that all the product pictures appear on a seamless white background.  This wasn't going to be easy with Biologic's products, since most of our packaging is white.  My brother sent me several boxes of products and about 100 million living nematodes in ziplock bags to photograph.  I set up a small makeshift photo studio in my study, and set to work.  This seemingly simple project soon became a source of great frustration, since I was fussy and wanted the pictures to turn out looking really nice.   

My basic lighting setup is shown above.  I used two soft box lights from either side, and one soft box shining in from the front.  A piece of dollar store foam board balanced on the side lights bounced light back down onto the product and kept the yellowish ceiling light from interfering with the colors.  I taped two thin pieces of dry erase poster board together and created a gentle curve to give that infinite white background look.  I created various stands and props with paper and tape to keep the products in position while I snapped my shots.  I was happy with my lighting, but the raw pictures weren't getting close enough to where I wanted them...

As you can see, the background isn't pure white despite my best efforts...

As you can see, the background isn't pure white despite my best efforts...

No matter how much I tried tweaking my camera settings and the lighting I couldn't the background to be pure white like the Amazon guidelines stipulated.  I had taken hundreds of pictures of boxes and was getting pretty bored and burned out.  My brother kept asking me where the pictures were, so I made one final push to finish them off.  I read up online about the art of product photography and realized that even the pros can't get a perfect shot in camera.  They get the pictures as close as possible and then use Photoshop.  Photoshop alleviated my frustration, and allowed me to finish off the project.

Photoshopped and ready for upload to Amazon.

Photoshopped and ready for upload to Amazon.

This project may have been a really frustrating way to start the new year, but I'm really happy with the results.  Its really fun to see my pictures up on Amazon now.  I kept the nematodes I used in this photo shoot and put them to good use ridding a fungus gnat infestation in the house of a sweet old Italian lady.  Within two weeks all the fungus gnats were gone, and all the potted plants were protected for months into the future.  

Need some product shots of your own for the internet?  I can be hired for small projects!