In an effort to encourage myself to further progress toward completing the short film that is currently in the “editing bay,” I’ve setup another page here to post rough cuts and seek feedback.  
Enjoy, and please do provide feedback.

This color would look good on my 220D.

By good fortune, I recently made my fourth visit to Europe in the past year or two, with recent trips to Austria, France, and Spain.  My official reason for travel was to attend The IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition and help lead a panel discussion for a special session on the effects of aging on the human face — and how that affects recognition, synthetic age-progression, and other technologies.  (I’ll write more on my recent research later).  Even while working, though, I always attempt to spend a little time exploring the area, and Amsterdam was well worth it.  

I’ll eschew discussion of some of the things for which Amsterdam is famous in favor of mentioning what I found to be the delightful aspects of the city.  In fact, as I’ve found in my recent travels, this visit in some ways made me lament returning to several aspects of our American culture — mostly the hurried, dollar-driven lifestyle that is so prevalent today.  (I feel that unchecked capitalism, taking our good fortune for granted, and an overabundant dose of greed has stolen much value from our modern American life; and our mismatched priorities have caused us to focus so much on so little). Not that Europe is perfect, of course, but there are many things that are admirable very enjoyable in the traditional, old-world lifestyle.

Amsterdam is a beautiful city in many ways with a variety of architecture and an impressive span of structural history.  There does not seem to be one or two iconic locations, perhaps, as in many other well-known cities, but there is a never-ending maze of streets with old, crooked buildings overlooking canals that keep the city from drowning.  In these canals are a variety of boats, including those to entertain visitors, those for recreation (with a good smattering of antique wooden craft), and those to serve the live-aboards (for which I have a certain affinity, of course).  About every third block, mixed with the cobblestone row-houses, restaurants, and shops is a nice little cafe where Illy or Lavazza may be enjoyed.  

Next to these cafes and canals, are one of the most admirable aspects of Amsterdam — the ubiquitous bicycle lanes.  The bicycle lanes are well used, too.  Well-dressed and fit, attractive people move along their way without ever turning a key other than to unlock their bike. Rather than parking lots, there are hundreds of nice-looking, old Dutch-style bicycles chained to anything that will take them.  I rented a bicycle while I was there from Bike City.  The guys at the shop are great, the bike was lots of fun, and I had an excellent time biking to the conference from my hotel down near RAI and also exploring the city before and after meetings.  There are of course the highlights of the Van Gogh Museum and other great museums as well as the Anna Frank house that tells an intriguing and sad story, but the city by itself warrants a visit and lots of exploring apart from the typical.  While there, I’d recommend trying some wonderful Indonesian food at Sama Sebo.  As with any country and people, there have been good and bad moments, but the long history with Indonesia has certainly helped create some of the best food in Amsterdam. Take a look at my Flickr photostream for some more images from Amsterdam.

Sometime close to a year ago, now, I shot the footage for a short film that I wrote — working title “Coffee Talk.” I have been lacking the introduction for the film which takes place in a local cafe. I just recently put this together as a possible opening montage that is needed to set the tone and location. The footage was taken in a little cafe in Amsterdam (a real cafe, not one of the “coffeshops”, by the way) where they serve one of my favorite coffees, Illy. (The temporary music is a song by Carla Bruni). I hope to finish the whole short film sometime later this year to send to festivals.

On another related note, I still need to find a location to shoot as the establishing shot for the cafe. I do not think that the real location where I shot most of the short is very photogenic, so I would like to find the outside of a building that could serve as the setting for a local cafe — perhaps a Caribou Coffee or independent shop somewhere that looks nice from the outside.

If you have any comments related to this opening montage, or ideas for a nice cafe exterior somewhere, I would be very interested in hearing them.

GPS is being used everywhere. One of my friends does not even go around the corner without “punching it in” to her car’s GPS display. They are amazingly accurate these days, except for the occasional time that one is sent down the wrong road or ends up at a blocked street or somewhere completely inconvenient. Not usually the fault of GPS, though — usually the mapping algorithms and data that is no longer current. Actually “looking up” every once in a while will often solve that, though.

Anyway, I’ve added a Whereabouts tab (above) with my last known location. Perhaps you’ll even be able to track me live if I have the service activated while you’re online — follow the links below the map on that page to see.

It is one of many neat new GPS applications. The company that does this particular one is InstaMapper. I’m also a big fan of SPOT that I use while traveling and off adventuring. Here’s a link to a shared page that shows my occasional SPOT GPS Tracks. SPOT is great because you can send different messages via text and email from large portions of the Earth’s surface that will announce that you are “Ok”, “Need some help”, or “Need a lot of help.”

The Nikon D90 has been all over the Internet for the past few weeks because of its movie mode, the first on a D-SLR. Of course, most of the people who are really interested realize that the low depth-of-field for artistic control of focus in the frame as well as interchangeable lenses are why this is pretty revolutionary. Of course, there will be many offerings over the next few years, but this is the first. It has some major drawbacks in the form of very heavy M-JPEG compression, no easy manual control of the ISO and shutter selection, and a troublesome rolling shutter effect on the CMOS sensor. That being said, though, it can be a very artistic and capable tool if used carefully. One of the cleanest videos put together in this first week or so of release is this one by StoiQa over at Vimeo:

I’m waiting for this diesel-think WVO-electric hybrid with solar-panel supplemental power, 200 h.p., and live-aboard design with aesthetics that parallel the original VW bus.

Visit the Verdier website for more information.  This enigmatic green machine is apparently still in development but has already won several design awards.  Perhaps one day in a semi-distant future, I’ll be taking it somewhere fun when I’m not sailing somewhere else.