Plans for 2013

Ever start a project you’ve been putting off and find it leading you in totally new directions?

This one was taken when I was a postdoc at NCAR in the early 70’s.

I did a lot of photography at one time. I have stacks of 35 mm slides taken with my old Nikon through-the-lens reflex and older 2 ¼ x 2 ¼ slides taken on 620 film. I’ve wished before I could use them on the blog, though sadly many were lost in the fire, as was the camera. I did get a batch of what I thought were wildflower photos converted to digital at Sam’s to see how good a job they did. (Some of the digitized photos from the first round are on this blog, and as you can see they weren’t all wildflowers, and included some I knew I’d taken but thought were lost.)

I decided to get the rest of the slides digitized. This has involved going through a number of poorly-labeled boxes, in the course of which I discovered that while none of my finished, spliced-together super 8 movies had survived the fire, a number of bits from the late 60’s and early 70’s have. I haven’t been able to view them yet (no projector) but I have some ideas on that.

(3 pm update: a friend loaned me a super 8 projector, which is currently warming up enough that the condensation on it evaporates. Also a screen. Remember those? I should know by this evening if I have anything left on the film.)

(Not quite 4 update: I definitely have content, and some looks good enough to put on YouTube–if I can just get it digitized!)

Thought I’d lost this one. My first two Shelties, Derry and Bonny, with their obedience trophies from the 1978 National Specialty.

The first step is to see what’s there, and then I hope I can get the good ones digitized. And if I can, why not make them into videos and share them on YouTube? I have iMovie and GarageBand on my Mac, but I’ve never used them. So I fired them up a few days ago, and discovered that I had video clips on iPhoto. Mostly they’re accidents when I hit the video switch on my camera without realizing it, but a few with the iPhone were deliberate. I can’t seem to view them on iPhoto, but iMovie lets me go through them just fine. I also confirmed that iMovie will accept still pictures, even giving me a sort of movie when I put individual burst shots together.

Then there was the flower garden I planted while I was living at Wynfromere Farms in the early ’70’s. Again, I knew I’d taken pictures, but didn’t know where they were.

Then I started thinking. Didn’t I have a video camera somewhere? A Flip I got a couple of years ago, tried out on several subjects, and then put away when I couldn’t figure out how to do anything with the video? That was before I got iLife ’11 installed, and when I found the Flip and plugged it into the Mac to charge it, it proceeded to open iPhoto and download itself, giving me numerous clips I’d totally forgotten I had from the dog show a year and a half ago.

At the moment, I think I need something to bring me up to speed on iMovie and GarageBand, so I’ve ordered the iLife ’11 Portable Genius. Paper. I don’t really like manuals on-screen, particularly if I may need to be flipping back and forth between several pages. But I think I might be able to do something with snowflake images and “Six-Pointed Snowflakes,” just to get my feet wet. And learn how to post on YouTube, of course.

On internal evidence, this was taken in the ’70’s. Good example of the pink and blue effect I’ve been talking about. I think from the angle I probably took this from the back of my horse, Challenge.

Guess I know what I’m going to be doing new this year besides writing, editing, and uploading a short story to Amazon direct!