Disney Rave
Last month I took my first cruise. It wasn't something on my to do list but the opportunity presented itself and I took it. And it turns out cruises are pretty cool. This particular one was a Disney cruise, which didn't really mean much of anything to me. To my wife and kids it was a big deal. They all grew up with Mickey Mouse and friends. I grew up idolizing Bugs Bunny. But that's another story entirely. This one is about the pirate night dance party.
The party kicked off as the sun was setting. This cruise was to Halifax, so this meant the top deck was a rather cold windy place to be. Toss in a dense fog and you have an odd party atmosphere but one very well suited to cool photographs. And as the oddity of seeing Disney characters in pirate gear dancing wildly washed over my brain, it occurred to me that this might make an interesting video. So I switched from stills to video and did my best to capture the moment. This is not my best camera work. I had no equipment to help stabilize the shot, not even my viewfinder. So focus was a best guess and I tried to keep from shivering too much. In spite of all that, I'm pretty pleased with the final product.
Nested
In the spring, a pair of robins built a nest in the transom window above our front door. We were treated to a front row seat as they built the nest, laid eggs, hatched them, fed their babies and eventually sent them out into the world. Several times I taped a Flip camera on to the window to film them. Several other times I sat on our stairs, with my Canon T2i trained on the nest, capturing the action as the parents came and went with worms and bugs to feed the chicks. And as luck would have it, my wife dragged me out of bed very early one morning to capture the last baby leaving the nest.
This took me a long time to produce. Partly due to the hours of footage that I needed to sift through but mostly because my desktop suffered a serious breakdown, forcing me to overhaul it. There are a dozen other excuses, none of them particularly interesting. But last night I found out my script Hive had not advanced to the quarterfinals of the Nichol Fellowship competition. That hit me pretty hard but also made me more determined. So I threw myself at this project to finish it. And that made me feel a lot better because I'm pretty damn proud of this.
My Shorts
