Tag Archives: videos

Events, Places

Tea ceremony at the Morikami Museum

We attended a formal tea ceremony, a sado, at the Morikami Museum’s Seishi-an Tea House, in Delray Beach (Florida, USA). A Japanese tea ceremony involves the ceremonial preparation and presentation of matcha (powdered green tea) to an honored guest, and is governed by four words: harmony (wa), reverence (kei), purity (sei), and tranquility (jaku). This particular sado, or chanoyu, that we attended, lasted about 30 minutes. I had to edit the video down to just under 10 minutes so I could put it on YouTube.

This video was recorded in HD (720p) with the Olympus PEN E-P2 and the Micro Four Thirds 14-42mm compact lens, which I am currently testing for an upcoming review.

Watch it on blip.tv | YouTube

More info on Morikami Museum and their tea ceremony is available at morikami.org, and detailed information about the Japanese tea ceremony is available at wikipedia.org.

http://blip.tv/file/3343324

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Places

Las Vegas: A Night On The Strip

A video from our recent trip to Las Vegas. It’s a tour of the Las Vegas Strip at night, featuring most of the famous hotels and casinos, plus impromptu shows by the dancing fountains at the Belaggio and the volcano at the Mirage.

There’s an upcoming video dedicated to Bellagio’s dancing fountains, where huge artesian fountains spit water into the air from hundreds of jets, all of it synchronized to music. I thought they were amazing. I also have a day tour of the Strip, which is an interesting contrast to all of the lights and colors you see at night, and I’ll edit that in the near future.

The video you see here is a 3-day editing effort. It takes a bit to assemble all the sequences, and there’s a fair bit of software motion-stabilization to steady the shots.

Enjoy!

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Thoughts

Quantum dots for LEDs

Last month, I wrote about CFLs and LED light bulbs, and today, I found a great video from Economist magazine, which not only talks about a new technology called quantum dots, but also does a great job of explaining the differences between incandescents, CFLs and LEDs when it comes to the light spectrum and lumens they emit.

It turns out a company in Massachusetts called QD Vision is among a handful of companies that are developing quantum dot filters for LED bulbs. These filters improve the spectrum emitted by LEDs to make the light less harsh, warmer, and closer to the spectrum of incandescent light bulbs, which ultimately makes it more pleasing to the eye. Personally, I think their filters make the light slightly redder than it needs to be, but still, it’s a step in the right direction.

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Places

At home in FL

This is a short video recorded in the yard of our home in South Florida, in December 2008. It features flora and fauna typical of our sub-tropical climate, such as palm and pine trees, ficus, lizards, and various flowers. I recorded these sequences with a (then) new digital camera, the Kodak EasyShare Z1015 IS, a 10 megapixel, 15x optical zoom camera that also takes 720p HD videos.

Given my fairly positive experience with the Kodak EasyShare v610 camera, I thought the Z1015 IS would be a good step up. It would have been, except for certain flaws which made me return it, such as its unacceptably soft and grainy images at 12-15x zoom, and heavy banding and compression artifacts visible on a lot of the HD video clips I shot with it.

Perhaps I’ll post a fuller review of the Z1015 at some point. It would still be relevant, even though it’s been almost 1½ years since I tested it, because Kodak still lists it on their website, and the price is only $20 below its original $299 tag.

The video was intended to be a test of the camera’s capabilities. The only editing/manipulation I did was to image-stabilize some of the clips in iMovie. The camera’s image stabilization work alright for photos at long focal lengths, but it has a difficult time keeping up when video is being recorded at 7-15x zoom. The audio is unchanged, so you’ll get a good sense of the microphone’s ability, and the colors are what the camera gave me. It’s in HD, so watch it full screen to enjoy it.

Watch “At home in FL” on blip.tv | YouTube

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Thoughts

SmugMug now supports oEmbed

According to this GetSatisfaction discussion, SmugMug have implemented support for oEmbed. When I first tried it a few weeks ago, putting a one-line URL in a WP.com post didn’t show the video, but it worked on WP self-installs. Still, you had to hack the URL by prefacing the video URL from the address bar with the SmugMug oEmbed API URL (http://www.smugmug.com/services/oembed/?url=), so that was a hassle. I have found out since that the folks at SmugMug are working with WP on simple video embeds (like the ones at YouTube or Vimeo or blip.tv) — see the GS discussion for the details.

Tonight, I decided to try the old hack URL on my blog (hosted at WP.com) to see how things are coming along. Surprise, surprise, videos play nicely! Have a look below. It’s a video of my tom cat, Felix, sleeping in my arms. The direct URL to the video, in case the embed stops working at some point, is this.

http://www.smugmug.com/services/oembed/?url=http%3A//www.raoulpopphotography.com/Other/My-Videos/8635949_WoFHs#741544973_ZdwRZ

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