Lou

Michael

Post from: Kendrick Disch's Blog

I needed to post a picture to test something I’ve been working on and this is a picture I already had sitting on flickr, so it got published!

Post from: Kendrick Disch's Blog

It will be no surprise that I choose to watch MSNBC and Keith Olbermann is a large part of that reason. I find him to be a very skilled anchor on his ideological show, “Countdown with Keith Olbermann”. He isn’t afraid of showing passion and certainly isn’t afraid of letting people know his opinion as you will see below.

So when I saw the Saturday Night Live skit with Ben Affleck impersonating Keith Olbermann, I thought it was so funny I had to share it.

(Video Link)

For those who haven’t watched the show, watch the video below to see how well Affleck took Olbermann’s mannerisms and tweaked them just enough to be hilarious but not so much it drifts away from an impersonation!

(Video Link)

Post from: Kendrick Disch's Blog

So you can imagine my excitement about this cool software I found called TunesTEXT. It’s an OSX Dashboard Widget that works with Itunes to automatically search for song lyrics to the song you are currently listening to. Not only that, it downloads those lyrics and copies them into the song ID3 info. It also shows you any album artwork attached to the file. You can also use this widget to advance the tracks or pause the music.

So anytime I’m working on something and I want to glance at the lyrics of the song that is playing, I just hit the widget key (F12) and suddenly I can sing until my voice is raspy. Below is a screen shot of the widget in action.

I have two complaints about it though. Sometimes it has trouble finding the lyrics to certain artists or albums. I guess it needs to search through more databases or something. The other problem is that usually when it is downloading the lyrics, it causes the music to skip for half a second or so. Not a deal killer, but pretty annoying. Other than that, it’s pretty great. I’d actually like to see this feature built right into Itunes.

Download it by going here: http://www.cyanworks.net/dboardTunesTEXT.html. The website is kinda sketch, but the app works great!

Post from: Kendrick Disch's Blog

I grew up in Arkansas which has incredible fall colors, but I must admit, this fall in Maine was really quite beautiful and probably more colorful than most Autumn’s in Arkansas.

Post from: Kendrick Disch's Blog

The tilt shift lens is very tricky to use. For the non-photographers out there: basically it gives you the ability to manipulate your plane of focus on an x, y, and z axis instead of just the normal x axis. So you can throw certain areas of the image out of focus. The problem is that the more you manipulate the plane of focus, the more bouncing around inside the lens the light has to do and therefore, the more difficult it is to accurately asses the needed exposure settings. Add to this that this is a very wide angle lens and has a tendency to distort the image at times and you get a situation where it takes a lot of practice to use this lens well.

Anyway, below is a flickr slideshow of some of the more successful images I got that night. If there is no slideshow showing up, try clicking here. Also, 3 of these shots were actually taken with my 50mm prime, but I’ll let you try to figure out which ones!

I’m interested to hear what you (the reader), think about using these slideshows on my blog versus what I usually do, which is just load up all the images one after the other down the column.

Post from: Kendrick Disch's Blog

Post from: Kendrick Disch's Blog

The Executive Director, Charles Altschul welcomes the crowd to the show!

Post from: Kendrick Disch's Blog

Post from: Kendrick Disch's Blog

I don’t claim to excel at outdoor/nature photography, I’ll leave that to my father and brother. But this lens begs to shoot birds, so here ya go.

I approached very slowly and the duck didn’t seem to mind me getting close. I got about 6 or 7 feet away and got this shot without having to crop!

I’d love to have this lens in my bag all the time! Although it is large and cumbersome, it’s really a good one to have for a variety of shooting environments. DPreview has the following to say:

The Canon 70-200mm F2.8 L IS USM is quite simply an excellent lens, which will reward users with quality images in almost every situation.

Post from: Kendrick Disch's Blog

Last summer while I was working for the Santa Fe Photography Workshops, I had the privilege of working with Dave. We worked closely together for the whole summer and he was a fantastic source of knowledge and humor. Anyway, he stopped into Maine for a quick visit before doing some photo printing and then heading overseas for some documentary photography work.

We hung out, tried to get into some trouble (very nearly succeeding), and shot some pictures in various places in Maine. I haven’t really had a chance to sort through most of the shots from then, but will post them eventually.

I would post a link to his website but he doesn’t have one. Eventually he will get one and I will link to it.

Here is Dave and the waitress that fell in love with him while she served us.

Post from: Kendrick Disch's Blog

We used 3 canon 580EXII flashes for the lighting with 2 pointed onto the makeshift backdrop and the third attached with a 4ft cord to the camera aimed at the subject.

Each photographer got a copy of the pics and is doing their own post processing. The shots below are my ’selects’ from the shoot and I wanted to share them with!

Michael

Kalie

Bruce

Carlos

Chris

Lou

Kalie

Bruce

Lou

Me

Post from: Kendrick Disch's Blog

Post from: Kendrick Disch's Blog

Now, here’s the thing, while filming this documentary Ryan and Steve the producer of the doc, were blown up along with a couple of the special forces soldiers in Afghanistan. He was seriously injured/burned and had to be airlifted to Germany. Filming was cut short by 7 days and the entire documentary changed course. It became a much more personal film and very compelling.

(youtube video)

The video above is of the producer talking about the incident and the impact it had on the film crew. The story is very engaging and powerful. With the director/producer and director of photography both in the hospital, the sound guy picks up a backup camera and records some extra footage. It’s just very moving to me because these guys are there trying to make an honest film about what it’s like to be in a war zone as a green beret and they very nearly die in that effort.

Ryan is just a little older than me and has had a similar life, so it’s hard for me not to put myself in his shoes. In the Q&A he talked in detail about what it was like and what he experienced during and after the filming. It was riveting.

Afterward all I could think about was the idea of sacrifice and what drives certain people to be willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for their country. Would I be willing to go shoot a documentary in Afghanistan or Iraq? I think since I am not married I’d be willing to risk my life and use my skills to bring back stories of the conflicts of the war on Islamic Extremists. But If I were married and/or had kids… i don’t know… Maybe I’d be more inclined to do it to try and make the world safer… or maybe I wouldn’t be willing to put myself in harms way and leave the people that depend on me for safety behind and alone. It’s a very tough moral decision and obviously one I don’t look forward to ever having to face.

The film is available on Amazon and also on youtube (divided into 6 parts, click ‘more from saif316′)

Post from: Kendrick Disch's Blog

One casualty so far in the process is my photoblog. I used it for awhile just to post photos but I never really knew exactly how to utilize it. It didn’t fit in with my style, so I axed it. I still plan on posting photos on the blog in a similar fashion, but now what I’m going to have is the ability to subscribe by category to my blog feeds. That way if you only want the photos you can just subscribe to that specific category RSS feed. I’ll explain more later. If you look back through the blog posts, you will actually see all the content and comments from my photoblog are actually already merged with the content from deepdisch.net.

I’m going to redesign my photo galleries and also install a new password protected client area for my photowork. A new section I’ll be adding is my section called ‘consulting’ or perhaps ‘digital tech’. A lot of what I do is helping with computer problems and consulting with photographers and filmmakers on digital asset management and associated topics. I’ve been doing this for over 8 years now, I figure it’s about time to make it officially part of my site.

All of this stuff takes lots of time to develop and design, so please be patient with me as I work to make this happen. I’m only able to work on this site a few hours per day if I’m lucky, so progress is slow, but things are definitely progressing and I’m pleased with the results so far.

Anyway, keep checking back for updates. Thanks.

Post from: Kendrick Disch's Blog

Let’s go back a bit in history, all the way back to when Clinton left office, there was a surplus in our budget which hadn’t happened under either of the previous republican presidents. It took a liberal “tax and spend” democrat from the lowly state of Arkansas to actually put this country on the right path. Sure things weren’t perfect but they were pretty good and getting better.

In 2000 Bush ran against Gore as a “compassionate conservative”. He didn’t turn out to be either of those things. The United States quickly dove into that surplus and then started spending massive amounts of money all while cutting taxes. It’s the opposite of a “tax and spend” liberal. It’s a “borrow and spend” conservative. In fact, the US debt has doubled since Bush took office. (source)

Due to the complete and utter greed of Bush’s friends in business and coworkers in the government, every possible avenue of making money was exploited. Gambles were made with reckless abandon and the people in position to make important decisions about financial matters, made all the wrong decisions. I’ve actually been concerned for quite some time and in fact made a post right here on this blog back at the beginning of 2007 concerning this very topic. I quoted an article talking about the need to solve the problem now, not when the economy goes south. Here’s what I quoted:

The good news is that because the problem only grows more intractable with every passing day, our dithering politicians will have fewer options to chose from when the crisis hits thereby making their jobs that much easier. The bad news is that the more time we spend in denial, the less time remains for us to get busy and do something about it. There is even the danger that if we wait too long, we will face a potentially unfixable problem on the scale of what the Soviet Union experienced - catastrophic economic failure.(source)

So, this situation was easy enough to see years ago by experts and those experts were able to relay that information to the public that cared, including me. So how can the government not have known? The answer is they did and they didn’t care.

I don’t trust this government at all and I do not want to give them any more money. This government has screwed up the lives of so many people already that I’m not willing to let them touch any more of the taxpayers money. If I had a say in the matter, most of the executive branch of government would be impeached and perhaps jailed and members of the do nothing congress we have, would be relieved of duty. This goes for both democrats and republicans. I’m particularly disappointed that Barack Obama supports a bill like the one the Senate passed yesterday and the House will be voting on tomorrow.

Secretary Paulson actually has stated that he will be leaving his post in 4 months. We don’t know who will replace him. This proposed bill gives the person who will replace him an incredible amount of power. If you listen to some people talking about this “crisis” they seem to suggest that if this money isn’t handed over to the Secretary of the Treasury immediately, then the entire global economy will collapse and the world as we know it will be over. That’s a pretty significant level of trust we are putting on somebody who already has one foot out the door and then on the unknown individual who will replace him.

I suggest both presidential campaigns name the person they would choose to appoint to the position and let them start taking questions as to how they would handle things. It just makes sense that we should have this knowledge when our congressmen are voting for this bill and we as voters need to know before cast our ballot for president.

But back to the point, obviously $700,000,000,000 is a lot of money. A lot.
To put it into perspective, the Iraq war has cost this country : ###
(source)

My immediate reaction to the idea of spending $700,000,000,000 is “woah… is buying up bad debt really the best way to spend that much money?” I don’t know the answer to that question but neither does Congress. The fact that the Bush Administration is trying to hammer this legislation through without giving people time to think about it, makes me super suspicious about their motives. Bush has gone on TV a few times now and given ominous sounding warnings about the urgency of this crisis:

(youtube video)

The problem is, we’ve heard this before from the Bush administration… Colin Powell trotting out to the UN with a powerpoint slideshow talking about the urgency and need to invade Iraq and the hastily passed Patriot Act. Two examples of this routine leading us down a path that in hindsight we should not have followed.

They claimed last week that if the bill didn’t pass by tuesday of this week, the world would end. Or at least the economy would be beyond saving. In reality we are still fine. And we will be fine for quite some time. I hope congress will do some small things that will help the economy now, then once a new administration is able to come in, they can work on some plans that will actually significantly help the situation in the right way, with proper deliberation and some actual thought about the future.

I think about what a $700,000,000,000 investment in alternative energy research and development would do for our nation in the long term. I think about ways that money could be spent on a national health care plan and a real investment in education. These are things that will actually help our economy by creating wealth, not just taking good money and sending it after bad money.

I have several more thoughts on the topic, but it is getting late, and I’ve already said plenty.

To end, here is a short video of Eisenhower warning against the dangers of the military/industrial complex, and it’s scary accurate!

(youtube video)

Post from: Kendrick Disch's Blog