WOW! I just realized I haven't posted anything in almost 3 weeks, whoops. Well I'll have at least 2-3 posts by next week up to make up lost time. I got a new photographic tool(toy) that I'm gonna post some review stuff up, including some sample photos I've taken and some others I expect to take later this week. I've got some other updates as well coming soon that I've been spending a bit of time working on, which I hope to announce by Fri/Sat of this week, well at least I'll tell you about it by then if it hasn't launched by then. 1 billion points to whoever can either guess A) what new tool/toy I picked up or B)what I expect to announce/launch by the upcoming weekend.. first person to 2 billion points wins the prize...which is to be determined. (BTW check the Drobo post, I've added an update to the bottom about the past couple week's experience)
Video Project in 3 days = No sleep
James and I on our first day of shooting...prior to sleep deprivation...
So those of you who don't know...I have had all of 8 hours of sleep over the past week. I got approached by a GM in my district about creating a video project around customer acquisition and innovation in our local stores last week. I agreed to work on it without knowing when he needed it by (he made it sound like their was plenty of time). The next day he calls to tell me a little more about the project. This is a video which is to be made to show to our Executive Vice President of Retail and our CFO who would be coming to our territory office on the 27th. I said "The 27th of July? Okay." No...it was the 27th of June. This conversation was last Friday the 20th.
I freak out as I had to work all weekend and was scheduled to work all this week. I managed to get my employees to work a bunch of extra shifts to cover me, and grabbed James ( a friend at the company who I've done several video projects before...also a fellow contributer to Tech Tuesdays at Sillyman.org) and filled him in on the details. We began shooting Monday morning and found out Tuesday afternoon after shooting the last bit that this video needed to have a rough draft (90% complete) by 3PM Wednesday...
To make a long story short, this project took about 50 hours of actual work and James and I were sitting in front of a camera or a computer for close to 65 hours (waiting for things to render, import, ect) over the course of 3.5 days. We found out Thursday EVENING that the time for the presentation has been cut back, and due to time constraints they won't have time to show the video (it's only 7.5 minutes long!)
I wasn't going to blog this, but I emailed the video to a couple friends in the industry and they wanted me to post this up just to show everyone exactly how (to put in Armin's words) "...this really shows how much TIME and EFFORT goes into a freakin’ 7 minute video!"
Sorry I am not willing to link or post this video as it is does contain proprietary company information, but just rest assured that it came out great.
At least I got out of a blue shirt for a few days...
Softball 08
Today I was shooting a softball game for Best Buy's D91 annual tournament. They usually don't take it seriously as to go out and make uniforms specifically for the event, but this year the Gainesville store went all out and got jerseys made. Sterling VA completely dominated every round they played, with the first game being the biggest landslide with Sterling aat 28 runs OVER what Gainesville had. I took about 1700 shots and boiled it down to the top 250ish and uploaded the lot onto noahhayes.net under events if you'd like to view the events from the whole day, but I decided to post a couple of my personal favorites here for you.
You usually don't see baseball/softball games from the angle of the field in photos, but here's one...
Kyle's pretty fast too
Stu warming up
Zach's would-be hilarious shirt if 1022 (Leesburg VA) had more than three people show up to play...those three got stuck on Rick's team
George sporting his Julbo shades...
These were some pro-quality burgers and dogs, many thanks to Helen for feeding everyone...
Jermaine decided to play a little basketball while on a break between going up to bat...
Leanna and Kat(below) both decided to slide head first into the muddy expanse between 2nd and 3rd base...
Hope you enjoyed these, I've got some new photo toys I'll be testing out this week and putting a full review (or at least some sample photos) later this week when I get some more time. (BTW I usually don't shoot JPEG, but I did today expecting to take more photos than normal...I used up nearly 11 GB of cards using JPEG alone, which was mind boggling to me. Fortunately nearly all the shots were great straight out of the camera and the only post-processing I had to do was a little cropping here and there)