Live Bullets

I've been a fan of cinematographer Shane Hurlbut's work for some time now. And his decision to shoot the movie Act of Valor primarily with Canon 5Ds had me more than a little interested to see that movie. I shoot with that camera's little brother, so the notion that a stills camera could be used for this level of action movie was pretty exciting.

While watching the Super Bowl tonight I saw the ad for the movie and one shot in particular caught my eye. It was overhead shot of boats full of Navy SEALs firing on something. What caught my eye was the look of the gunfire, which looked very cool but also unlike other movies. Now I know why. Check out this little featurette where they talk about shooting scenes with live ammo. Let me say that again. Those aren't blanks or digitally inserted tracer rounds. Those are real bullets being fired.

These people are crazy. And I totally support such craziness in the service of making a movie.

Happy New Year

That's it. I just wanted to say it. I completely missed the changing of the year when it happened.

But I'm still writing the novel. 67,275 words and still going.

Yes

Genius.

Day 297

Yup. More ice.

I'll be honest.  This 365 day photo project is starting to wear me down.  The first few days were awkward and exciting, kind of like having a new girlfriend.  The middle was a lot of ups and downs.  Now as I approach the end, it's starting to feel like a slog.  Some of that is the weather.  In the past, when hard up for a photo idea I just headed into the backyard and found something of interest.  You know what's in the backyard now?  Snow.  Same as the front yard, just harder to get to.  The world has gone monochrome on me.  I'm dying for some color.

Inside the house are the kids, pets and my wife.  All of whom are sick to death of my pointing a camera at them.  Yes, even the cat.  I point the camera at her and instead of doing something cute she just moves in closer and demands that I pet her.  Adorable yes, helpful no.

Yesterday I took a trip to photograph some swans a friend told me about.  That was nice but I nearly froze to death, taking some of the fun out of it.  That's another problem.  Cold is not generally a big deal to me.  But when freezing is pretty much standard for any picture taking session, it does get tiresome.

I've learned a lot about photography in the past ten months and my tastes are becoming clear.  I don't necessarily have favorite subjects but I do love color.  And right now, I'm starved for it.  Today's photo is black and white.  Why?  It seemed appropriate.  There wasn't much color to drain from it anyway.

I'm done bitching.  For now.

New Site

Howdy folks.  I'm changing things up around here.  The site wasn't what I wanted it to be anymore so it was time to make some changes.

Way back when, this place started out as a personal site for a movie club.  From there it evolved into a site that dispensed movie news and reviews.  After I became a parent that was scaled back to just reviews.  After I decided that I didn't want to be a critic and instead wanted to make my own movies...  Well, let's be honest.  The place has kind of sucked since then.

The site had become secondary to my personal goals but because of the immense amount of time that I had invested in it, shutting it down was just too painful.  So the place has limped along with sporadic posts and no real purpose.  Along those lines, the structure of the place was a problem.  I built it big because the archive was immense and I intended to keep growing.  That just doesn't make sense anymore.  So I'm switching from the Joomla content management software to a WordPress blog system.  Because this is now a personal blog.  I don't need all those extras.  I want it simple to post and manage.

Hopefully this change will get the old girl going again.  An easier system should encourage me to ramble more.  The downside is that I may ramble about whatever is going through my brain at the moment.  But it should be a lot more active.  I'll slowly shift some of the archives to this system but not all of them.  I'll set a terminus point and a link to find anything older.  I don't think anyone should be too bothered by that and I'll be damned if I'm going to drag thousands of old pages into this new blog.  That's just not the point.

I'd say look around but there's not a whole lot to the new site at this point.  I do like the way it looks though.  The old one was just plain ugly, and as the person who made it that ugly, I'm qualified to say that.  Keep checking back though.  This might actually get interesting.