My REAL First Animation

In a previous post I talked about my first animation. It actually wasn't my first. The first piece we did in that class was a simple 10 second animation done the old fashion way on an animation stand. We had to draw everything then place each drawing under a camera, snap a shot, advance the camera one frame, then repeat. It was terribly boring even with just 60-70 drawings to photograph - imagine doing thousands. I think the lesson was to show us why computers are the way to go.

For a long while I only had a video tape of the whole class and the 4x6 cards I drew on as a flip book. But recently I scanned everything into the computer and used After Effects to assemble and make adjustments. Much easier then the Oxberry.
Down load Fisherman.wmv

Tokyo #14; Shinjuku Alley

This shot was taken in a narrow back alley of Shinjuku, Tokyo. There were many restaurants crammed in along the way. Roy pointed out one that is famous (or infamous) for serving all sorts of gross things. I wanted to stop in but I was overwelmingly out voted. I didn't notice at the time, but I love that the obasan (old lady) stuck her head out the door as I snapped the shot.

Wakeboarding

A nice shot of my friend Jon Freeland on a wakeboard. We were at his brother Jason's cabin this summer. I didn't make it up on the board but did manage to drink lots of beer.

Big Storm Photos

On Saturday night there was a big thunderstorm that roared through the area. A tornado destroyed part of a suburb about 40 miles away but only skirted us. However it put on quite the light show for us at about 11 pm. Linda commented that it was like the movie 'War of the Worlds'. She was right - the sky was almost constantly ablaze. I couldn't resist, I grabbed my camera and headed for the patio. I set up the camera on my gorillapod and did some 2-4 second exposures. I mostly just continually shot for about 5 minutes. I guess the most interesting thing about this particular shoot was that I was still in only my underwear!

I had to really do some tweaking to make the exposure work but I really like what came out. Out of about 50 shots there were only 6 that had any sharp lighting and these were the 2 best of the 6.

Martin Zellar photos

Friday night we went to a free concert in the back lot of a church in our town. It seems like Minnesota churches (maybe elsewhere?) have gotten onto the idea of raising funds by putting on concerts and selling beer. Obviously it's working. The band was Martin Zellar, a somewhat famous local singer know for the former band Gear Daddies. If you've ever been to a hockey arena in North America, you've heard Martin Zellar's singing on the 'Zamboni Song'.



I took the chance to try out my digital camera and telephoto in the difficult conditions of shooting with available light and using no flash. As a rule there is actually a lot of light hitting the performers despite the dark surrounding. I tried various combinations of ISO settings and F-stops. As suspected, an ISO of 800 was about right. Martin's black shirt wasn't too hard to separate from the background. Actually I had to do very little post work. I used the beta version of Adobe Lightroom to make some slight adjustments. I'm really liking Lightroom and can't wait for it to be sold. I've used it to organize and tweak my photos all Summer. My only gripe is that the adjustment values have little correlation to the numbers I know from Photoshop. But the ease of tweaking exposure, etc, makes up for it somewhat.

All the photos turned out great. It was hard to pick out the best.

VO2 Max Test

VO2 Max is the measure of the maximum amount of oxygen volume a person can use during hard effort like running, biking, etc... I guess it would apply to anything that makes you breath hard. I had a chance to be a guinea pig at work for a demonstate of the test to measure VO2 max. The lead tester is also one of the cyclist at work - a damn good one as a matter of fact - so he was the one who got me involved.



To start they had to hook me up to a 12 lead ECG to monitor my heart rate (HR). Then they placed a facemask on to measure my inhaling and exhaling as well as the amount of oxygen (O2) I used. After getting everything strapped on a got on the stationary bike and started to warm up as the got the computer set up. Everything was recorded in realtime and present on a projector in front of the class. Oh yeah, I was in front of about 15 employees in that sexy little shirt! The mesh was to hold all the electodes in place as we excersize. Believe it or not before I slide it on it was about the size of a large sock!
The test began with a light resistance on the bike then increase every 30 seconds by 40 watts. That started to get hard after about 7 -8 minutes. Since I couldn't talk, they would show me a chart and I would have to indicate how difficult it was; easy, hard, very hard, etc,... The idea was to go to my absolute limit before I quit so that I'm at maximum heart rate. BTW there was a nurse there to monitor my blood pressure just in case. With my legs barely able to turn the pedals and lungs about to busting, I finally called it quits.
The test products a bunch of graphs and charts that I only half understood. But the bottom line numbers were that when I max'ed out at 440 watts my HR was at 184 and my VO2 max was 55 ml/kg. They told me later that that is 150% of what would be predicted for a 41 year old male (about 38 ml/kg).