Three lakes

We usually try to make it home to Minnesota for the Fourth of July, but that date fell between France and a big work deadline this year, so we put our visit off until the last week of July instead. It actually worked out really well. This way we were able to attend a birthday/going-away party for R's sister at Pleasant Lake and a baby shower held for us at Ely Lake. We also spent some time at Lost Lake in between... So out of 10,000 lakes, we managed to spend quality time at three of them over the course of a week, which I'd say is pretty darned good. More important than lakes, however, we saw our families and some friends. It's always a pleasure.

Our niece and nephew are becoming even more adorable than before, if that is even possible. I went a little crazy with the picture taking. I can't help it. There's something in me that wants to preserve images of these kids. Maybe it has to do with living so far away and only seeing them a few times a year. My photos of them are the ones I find myself going back to and viewing more than any others I've taken. I can't truly capture their wacky personalities, their playfulness, or their spirit of discovery with a still photo, but I can sure try.

It's funny how our perception of Minnesota, the northern part of the state especially, changes the longer we are away: the blues and greens become more vibrant; the weather, more dynamic; the mosquitoes, worse. But other things don't change, like difficult good-byes and this feeling I get when I pass through my parents' neighborhood at dusk: I'm reminded of biking around aimlessly as a kid... of playing Nerf tennis with my mom on the driveway... of launching ants into space with bottle rockets... of living in the same house as my brothers... I'm not saying one time in my life was better than another; I'm just saying the nostalgia hits me hard sometimes if I let it.

If you haven't already seen the photos from our trip, check them out here.

30 weeks

Dang, she looks good, doesn't she? You might even say she's glowing...

In this impromptu photo shoot, R is modeling a new maternity top her mom sent. There are a few additional outtakes at the bottom of this gallery if you want to see more.

R is in Wilmington for work from Tuesday through Saturday of this week, leaving me here to grill a bunch red meat, post some blog entries, and stay up way too late listening to loud music and watching DVDs I've been meaning to get to for years. Well, that's the hope anyway. I actually have a lot I need to get done around here in her absence. Our spare room is still a mess. Part of living near downtown means sacrificing space. Having a child, means sacrificing some more. My goal is to further clear out the closet and then de-clutter every horizontal space in this room before R returns. It's a lofty ambition. Good thing this appears to be true.

R's trip comes on the heals of my own business trip, which covered five nights last week plus a surprise one due to a missed connection on the way home. All of this travel is messing with our now-kicking-in nesting instincts. Fortunately, we had a sun-kissed weekend together here in Santa Barbara to split up the two weeks apart. Yeah, I enjoy my time with the place to myself, but my time alone with R is starting to feel precious and scarce. Our baby is three-quarters of the way here. And I love that.

Emily & Brian's wedding video

I finally got around to finishing up the wedding video I've been editing off and on since last September (thanks for your patience, Em). Actually I'm still working on the full-length version, but I'm calling this shorter, web-friendly version complete. The idea is that this preview can be passed around to the newlyweds' family and friends and also function as a demo of some of my work. It has to be quick if it's going to hold a casual viewer's attention.

You may watch it and wonder why it took so long to make... Well, first of all I by no means dedicated 100% of my free time to it. Secondly, getting the tone and the rhythm of the cuts right was quite challenging. Maybe they are still not "right," but at least I've watched it enough times now to brainwash myself into thinking they are. To be honest, I could probably tweak and re-tweak a video like this forever, but I have to cut myself off at some point. There are too many other things coming up on my schedule.

I'm not sure what I think about wedding videography yet. No, it wasn't my top choice of projects to spend so much time on, but I am glad to now have a wedding under my belt. I feel like the quality of my work could only improve from here on out (you get what you pay for when it comes to this kind of thing, and this one was on the house). I can't see myself shooting one of these every weekend and editing 40 hours a week. It would have to get repetitive. I'm all about taking on a variety of projects right now and, thankfully, by not being a professional, I get that choice.

26 weeks

Here's an up-to-date photo of R and her baby bump. Now we are getting somewhere! The reality of the situation is starting to sink in. We have enrolled in a seven-session child birth/care class beginning in August and still have some more baby-related items to acquire before the big day comes near the end of October. The problem is we're so bad at making decisions. We don't know what crib/diapers/rocking chair we want... We don't know how we want to organize the nursery/office/spare bedroom... At least clothes shouldn't be a problem. I get the impression R really likes shopping for little outfits for our baby. You have got to see the pear-print dress! I'll show you when we have somebody around here to model it.

Official "Liar's Chair" video

I helped with another ThreadSpinner video shoot a few weeks (months?) ago. This one was directed by the band's bassist, Warren, while I functioned as the director of photography. It was a little unnerving for me because we shot on a Canon 5D Mark II, which is a magnificent camera, but one I had not touched for the first time until the night before we rolled. Let's just say there was a last-minute cram session with the instruction manual involved...

When it comes down to it, however, this whole thing was Warren's vision. He called the shots and did all the editing. And I think he did a fantastic job.

It wasn't meant to be as overly ambitious as the band's epic "Night Chorus" video. The goal this time was to capture the raw energy of the band performing their hearts out from a few simple angles. We had a really narrow lens and a really wide one, so that's what we used. The "stuttery" look you may notice was achieved by shining some extra light on the set and then cranking up the shutter speed, with the hope being that would further accentuate the band's energy... To be honest they probably had enough on their own.

Don't they look like they're having fun? You can't fake that.

Recent trips, part 2: France

Where do you begin a blog entry about a week-long trip to a beautiful country during which each day was filled with notable sights and experiences? It seems to me a person needs to either write a whole bunch or else not even attempt to describe it. Well, I already filled quite a few pages in my handwritten travel journal and I prefer not to repeat myself, so this entry will probably fall somewhere between the two extremes.

Let me start with some negativity. About two hours into our voyage to France, right about the time we arrived at LAX, I realized I forgot the fourth and fifth most crucial things I needed. Here's a list of the top five:

1) Passport
2) Wallet
3) Camera
4) Camera battery
5) Camera battery charger

At the last minute of packing I had swapped camera bags and forgotten to move my battery and charger to the new one. Of course an SLR isn't powered by something as widely available as, say, AA batteries; I needed a specialized item that they don't sell in an airport. And since we arrived in Paris on a Sunday morning, there wouldn't be any stores open to sell me anything for at least 24 hours. Factoring in charging time, this ordeal amounted to about two days without my SLR and about $150 in replacement costs. Luckily, I had brought a back-up, point-and-shoot camera to cover those two days, but it's an older one and was really hard to revert to after using a more sophisticated piece of equipment for a few years. I'm still kicking myself over missed opportunities at the Louvre, the Seine, and Notre Dame... Grrrrr.

Okay, enough about that. I had to get it off my chest. The truth is we ended up with some great shots anyway and, more importantly, we had a wonderful time on our vacation.

We spent the first half of the week staying a few blocks away from the river in the Saint Germain district of Paris. It was great being within walking distance of some major attractions. Plus, we were also absolutely surrounded on all sides by wonderful cafes. We stopped in many of them for some petit dejeuner (a typical breakfast consisting of coffee, juice, and a ton of delicious bread in various forms) or an occasional espresso/tea in the afternoon. The waiters over there do not rush you out, so it was nice to sit as long as we wanted, do some people watching, and talk about baby stuff :-). Paris in general seems set up for and very conducive to long discussions, deep thinking, and even romantic moments (couples tend to sit side-by-side rather than across the table from each other over there). I like it.

One event I'd like to mention (mainly because we don't have any photo coverage from it) is the Jónsi concert we attended while in town. He is the lead singer of the band Sigur Rós but is currently doing a solo tour. We missed him when he came through California, but it worked out to catch him on our second night in Paris. He put on an amazing show that made use of a backdrop video not totally unlike the project I put together last year, at least in concept. Of course Jónsi's stuff reached a higher level of professionalism and included a more elaborate set with multiple display screens, but I really enjoyed seeing -- objectively this time -- what effect some high quality visuals can have on live music. It was a memorable concert, one that inspired me to consider working on another backdrop video one day, although not any time soon. Those puppies are a lot of work.

The second half of our trip was spent traveling around the Normandy countryside. This included stays in Honfleur, Saint Germain des Vaux, and Mont St. Michel. The first two are sleepy little towns along the coast where we got to relax away from the bustle of the city, soak up some of the local culture, and eat some more excellent food. There were some adventurous seafood outings where we didn't quite know what was being served to us (anybody up for some pentacles?). There was also some hot chocolate that could only be compared to the hand-made stuff we had at a chocolate plantation in Costa Rica. Yum. Oh, and one morning we had what I've been referring to as "the absolute best French toast I've ever had without any doubt." I had no idea French toast could be that gooey and flat-out delicious. It's fitting I'd have to go to France to find it.

If there was an absolute highlight from the trip, it had to be Mont St. Michel. This place just blew me away. I felt like we were staying in a castle from The Lord of the Rings. It's actually an abbey built on a rock island that juts out of what is otherwise very flat land. We could see it in the distance as we approached by car, and then it kept getting bigger and bigger. During the day the place is overrun by tourists, but we were lucky enough to spend the night within the walls of the commune. After the sun set we pretty much had the place to ourselves. We walked around the maze of elevated passages and tunnels, over drawbridges, through cemeteries... this was my kind of visit.

R did such a great job of planning this trip. We saw some city, some country; some old, some new; some rain, some sun. We dove in and experienced another culture and another language. I was able to detach from the rest of the world for a while (and it's not an easy task to get me to forget about work). We celebrated my lovely wife's 30th birthday and also got away one last time, just the two of us, before we hunker down and wait for our baby girl to join the party. I hope she enjoys the story one day of how her mom noticed some of her first kicks while riding on a boat down the Seine with the Eiffel Tower in view.

Be sure to check out the pics in our gallery. They are my only souvenir from the trip and were worth the trouble of tracking down a battery.

Recent trips, part 1: Washington state

We recently took two trips, and I've been wanting to write about each individually, even though at this point they are both starting to feel like old news. In fact, I've got a back log of about five blog entries and counting that I'd still like to write, so bear with me if I end up a month or two behind real time.

If our second trip this season took me out of my comfort zone, then the first trip was squarely in it. We traveled to an area of our country that has appealed to me for a long time: the Pacific Northwest. My interest in this region has sort of manifested itself over the years in the form of Twin Peaks, but it didn't start there. It began during a trip to Washington I took with my parents while I was in junior high. The place was inspiring to me then; it's inspiring now; and when I discovered Twin Peaks sometime in between, the mystery and the mood that inspired me were directly tied to the location.

R was attending a conference in Seattle at the end of May, so we decided to extend her stay and fly me up for Memorial Day weekend. We spent our first full day exploring the city (Space Needle, Pike Place Market, underground tour) and the two days after that in and around Snoqualmie, a small town where "a yellow light still means slow down, not speed up". This is where they filmed much of the pilot episode of Twin Peaks and quite a few exteriors that were used throughout the series. Keep in mind the show was made over 20 years ago, so things have changed a bit. It's also a little deceiving when you recognize the outside of a building and then you walk in and realize an entirely different set was used for the interior scenes.

I am proud to say we spent two nights at the Salish Lodge, pictured at he top of the waterfall above, which is a key spot in the show. And, as cheesy as it sounds, having a cup of coffee and a piece of cherry pie in the Double R Diner (called Twede's Cafe in reality) was an absolute highlight of the trip for me, despite the changed decor (Tweety Birds hanging from the ceiling?). You could say being there was the realization of a dream for me.

It's hard to complain about the weather in Santa Barbara, but maybe I needed a change because I found myself welcoming the rain we experienced in Washington. It was more of a steady drizzle that bounced off you than any sort of downpour. It enlivened the greens and provided the tree tops with some haunting mists. We saw a lot of this during a hike to Rattlesnake Ledge on our last afternoon up there. R once again impressed me by handling the four mile round trip and 1200 feet elevation gain quite well at about 19 weeks into her pregnancy.

As usual, our photos go into much more detail than I could ever describe. Check them out here to see more about our weekend getaway.

We're having a girl!

Here's the first of what will likely be very many photos of our daughter. We have some 3D images as well, but I'm not sure I'm ready to share those with the world yet. I kind of like the classic ultrasound look of this one. I have it on my bulletin board above my desk, and I'm enjoying thinking about who this new person might be and what her life will hold.

We're trying to keep the ultrasounds to a minimum, so this was our first of R's pregnancy at 21 weeks in. It was such a relief to hear from the doctor that our baby appeared perfectly healthy. We saw her in heart in action, measured her brain, witnessed her flexing legs... At one point she even reached up and rubbed her eye with her hand. There's a real, live human being in there!

We watched the whole ultrasound, but there was one thing the doctor noticed that we did not: the baby's sex. He wrote it down for us and sealed it up. This all happened first thing in the morning, so it was a long day of wondering what was in that envelope. Our day finally settled down around 8pm. R wanted me to look first and let her know, so that's how it went down. It was an absolutely magical moment.

R to the thirtieth

The other big milestone this spring is R's 30th birthday. As a matter of fact it's today (Sunday)! The clip below, from 2003, is my attempt at embarrassing her. One of the things I love about R is that she is always willing to help me out with one crazy shenanigan or another. It's difficult to find people willing to act goofy in front of a camera, but I can always count on her :-).


This weekend was probably lower-key than a 30th birthday weekend should be. I wish I would have planned more. Our original idea was to celebrate with a vacation in Paris, but the scheduling didn't work out, so we're going to be there a few weeks too late. We did go out to dinner at a French restaurant, Julienne, on Saturday night as preview of the trip to come. And today we took some good friends (pictured below) out to brunch at a place on the beach. Afterward we made a stop at the luxurious Bacara Resort, where R was treated to a pre-natal massage. It was a good weekend, but, seriously, the celebration has just begun. We are really looking forward to our trip!