Movies and Photos on the tiny Lumix DMC-FX50

Since coming back from NABShow in Las Vegas, I have been using my Lumix DMC-FX50 to shoot digital still images. I bought it in May 2007, used it once on a trip to New York City, then shelved it when the pictures I took were disappointed. It just took reading the manual for the camera to produce wonderful images. Unlike the Canon D5 I have been using to shoot models and studio images, the Lumix is tiny and light. I took it a couple of times while walking on the city's Monon Trail and took great pictures of wild flowers. It fit in my back pocket where its weight was hardly perceptible as I walked briskly along the trail. Being able to shoot pictures made the walks that much more pleasant.

Two years ago, too, I shot more video using Lilliputian Sony HD camcorder instead of the more complex Sony HVR-Z1U. A more complex still or video camera is great for manual shoots but for what I shoot currently, a simpler machine works best. I heard this from workshop leaders at NAB Show over and over again. In fact they foresee a time when professional products can be made with what we presently call prosumer hardware as Sony, Panasonic and Canon makes increasingly miniaturized products. The Lumix takes great photos as shown by this sample I took in the garden this morning under under dark, rainy sky.

Photo experts repeated throughout the conference that high resolution is not necessary for good images since the Internet can only display 72-ppi images anyway and the available video technology often just makes high-resolution videos unattractive in high resolution. In fact digital photographers and video makers often use softening, blurring filters to mimic film-based products.

I tested the Lumix movie-making capability this morning. It creates .mov files that were fairly crisp on playback on the Mac. With an Eye-Fi Explore Video Wi-Fi Wireless SDHC memory card, the camera can geo-tag still images and, even more functional, use Wayport Wi-Fi hot spots to upload them to Internet sites and on a Wi-Fi home network, upload to your computer even when the camera is turned off!

Technology is intoxicating! We live truly in amazing times. Industries continue the miniaturization of hardware at breathtaking speed. This camera was made over two years ago.

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Creating "relevance" on social media

Leesa Barnes at one of the workshops I attended at NABShow said that to collect "leads" on social media, your posts have to be "relevant." To be relevant, posts have "to solve a problem." Target a problem, not followers was her shibboleth. If readers find your postings useful, they are more likely to read it, respond or react to it, and the technology becomes the communication and potentially marketing tool it promises to be.

Collecting followers is not the most effective measure of the successful use of social media. Success depends on the followers you collect, and this in turn depends on why you are on social media in the first place.

Signing up on Twitter revivified my experience in social media. Prior to signing up for the 140-word-limit instant universal posting site, I had signed up for Facebook, MySpace, and Friendster and maintained photo upload sites at Flickr and Picasa but Twitter made me see how amazingly inter-connective the technologies were. Twitter, Facebook and their ilk are not called "social" for nothing. In our rapidly whirling, hurling universe, people are not only anxious to sell what they do well. We are increasingly isolated from each other, even from our domestic partners and children. Each one is busy with her or his own agenda, whether the agenda is work or fun-related. Social Media allow us to connect. Remember E.M. Forster whose motto was "to connect?"

To provide solutions to problems one has to have some expertise in an area. What is my expertise? I am not interested in what I have sold as a product for thirty years in my "old" career. I am all for new things now, New Media, new adventures.

For me, expertise is more than just knowledge or experience about some aspect of human mental, spiritual or bodily activity. It has first of all have to be some aspect of being human that fascinates me, that excites me, that I am prone to spend time and energy on, that challenges me and makes the juices flow. In a word, passion, or, since the word has recently been bandied around so much, that which is near the core of my being, the soul of life, my raison d'etre.

I shall be looking to identify this in the next few weeks. I don't seek followers or "influence" as much as I want to create supports for the energetics of creativity and productivity in my life. I have halfway learned to look inside myself for that excitement that verges on creativity. Company, friendships, loves are welcome but at this stage of life I know the buck stops with me. Notwithstanding I'm still a social creature like ants and bees and emigrating herds of gnus and Canada geese: why not utilize the benefits of community? Social media is community as envisioned by Marshall McLuhan in his famous prediction of the arrival of the "global village." Ethernet community is not the same as flesh-and-blood community. It is better. In some ways, any way.

So, the formula is: Find my passion and delineate within it expertise. From expertise offer what others may be useful or even necessary. Between the two, create.

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Fresh ingredients make healthy meals for body and mind, maybe soul, too

After a week eating hotel food, it's a relief to be back home to my usual fare. Cooking for one has its pros and cons. Sometimes I am too lazy to fix a meal I know will satisfy both my appetites: for maintaining a healthy body and for visual appeal. Thoughtfully prepared food is art. It is easier to eat moderate and healthy meals when they are prepared with a preponderance of fresh ingredients. Canned and other processed foods are lifeless, lacking in that vitality that feeds body and soul. Hot foods warm both heart and stomach. Leftover food come alive again when reheated with fresh ingredients or chilled as a salad.
 
What makes for vitality in our daily routines? Vitality for me is what soul or spirit is to other people. A friend tells me he goes to church on Sundays to feel "refreshed." Going to church starts us with a newly laundered soul for the new week. We stomp our feet and leave yesterday's dust behind. Confession used to serve a similar purpose for Catholics. They unburden themselves of guilt so there is room once again in their hearts to start anew. They will make mistakes again and accumulate flotsam and jetsam in the soul but there is the recourse of cleansing it in the sacrament of renewal.
 
Maybe this is the same impulse in many of us for spring-cleaning. We open the windows, change the bedclothes, put away the heavy winter garments and prepare to live more lightly again, unencumbered with the contemplative penitences of the dark, cold days. Which have their own virtue for allowing us to dig into our souls for what we may have lost from dancing like sprites in spring and summer.
 
Summer for me is fresh vegetables, just as spring is bright flowers. All though the calendar the seasons mark phases our lives mirror. We are infants, then frisky children, ambitious young adults, more easily contented older folks, until we can lay our bodies down gently to go into the night.

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Making HD Obsolete

Back home again in Indiana, spring continues its showy parade. This time I don't seem to have missed much while I was at NAB Show. The tulips are still pretty though they are no longer fat buds but wide-open in the warm sunshine. 81° today was cool compared to 91° in Las Vegas but the body remembers what it left behind when it was flown to the Nevada desert.
 
Glancing over my journal entries in Las Vegas I wonder at how much happened there in my mind. That all now seems like another world away, another time. It's a good thing I have these notes to prod me to remember what I experienced at NAB. The workshops I attended with one exception, the last I attended on how to make web videos "wildly popular", were overwhelmingly informative, powerhouses of practical tips I can apply to my work here.
 
Starting Monday I want to re-assess my use of social media, my blogs and websites. I have done enough exploring. It is time to focus and NAB Show was especially helpful in giving tips on how to do this. The workshop leaders were inspiring, speaking from their own experiences. Digital media has still a long way to go to be on par with film-shot movies but its state is definitely farther ahead from last year. The RED One camera is more firmly established, the resolution of its EPIC 617 now 28K or 28,000 horizontal pixels (compared to 1920 on an HD video camera). Digital video is also more established even as print media are reassessing their monetizing viability on paper vis-a-vis the Internet. Mobile broadcasting has started to show up on mobile devices. The future is exciting!
 
All this should fuel my own home-grown efforts to enter the digital content production industry. We'll see...

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Mobile broadcasting and new media mark NABShow 2009

I spent the last two days in workshops on using social media for marketing and distribution. I don't know if podcasting is going to go mainstream as presenters said it would. Mommycast is an example of one that became so popular they have sponsorship for the rest of the year. Dixie has an annual sponsorship contract with them.

On the other hand, podcast aggregators like iTunes are predicted to start listing videos for pay. Instead of downloading podcasts, viewers can download made-for-web videos, derivatives of larger formats that may even be available for theatrical release. Digital compression has made various formats possible.

The show has been exhilarating. I can hardly wait for the next one!

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Social Media and New Media Workshops at the NAB

Yesterday was social network workshops one after the other. Leesa Barnes (leesabarnes.com) from Toronto led a highly interactive two-hour program in the morning about how to use social sites to generate sales leads. That was an eye-opener for me although I have yet to implement what I learned from the podcast expert. She took her undergraduate degree in history, found herself hired as a project manager because of her organizational skills and didn't look back. She now has established herself as an Internet expert, does phone consultations ("so I don't have to leave home") and "webinars."
 
In the afternoon I attended two workshops by Paul Vogelzang with the PR firm Porter Novelli who with his wife and two other partners launched the highly successful podcast, Mommycast (mommycast.com). The program was the first podcast to obtain the sponsorship of a Fortune 500 company (one report said for $100,000 the first year) and was credited by Warner for 25% of ticket sales for March of the Penguins after Mommycast plugged the movie on their podcast.
 
The last workshop I attended was led by Alex Lindsay, founder of Pixel Corp, who told the audience these were exciting times for digital videomakers. Look at how the equipment and technology have advanced just in the past year. He thinks small consumer and prosumer camcorders will continue to add revolutionary features in the coming year.

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Experiencing, not understanding

In the Spring Issue of Moviemaker, character actor, James Cromwell, is interviewed about his interests. He is a philosopher, someone who attempts to make sense of his life and the world, but in response to whether the ultimate goal was to understand "the meaning of life," Cromwell called understanding the booby prize. "It isn't so much in the understanding, it is in the experiencing," he says.

In the 1980s when I began networking with people outside my career field I took hold of an idea that what people needed was time to take stock of where they are so they can make the proper adjustment in how they live their life to attain their goals and be consistent with their values. The mind has always been where I have felt most comfortable but to live in the mind is like masturbation. We need the courage (for some, this is no courage but just the way they are) to express our inner life with others. Some of us do well in solitude where they hatch their ideas by themselves but most I think create better ideas interacting with others, with other people's ideas. Even in the evolution of species, reproduction involves the mingling of chromosomes from two distinct individuals. One can say that this is the biological imperative for everything we do for love, maybe an imperative that spills over into our need for society and community.

Richard Florida yesterday pronounced his belief that our future depended on our individual and communal creativity. This is based on a society that allows, maybe even encourages individual self-expression. The more diverse the community, the more individual expression becomes honed and polished into brighter, more effective ideas that benefits the whole. In this way of thinking, obstacles like economic depression, bankruptcy, the failure of financial institutions, personal tragedies like illness or loss are necessary ingredients for the hatching of powerful ideas. When we are stopped in our way by circumstance, we either change direction or become stronger in pushing our way through. Both are essential processes in how reality takes shape.

At the super session yesterday with Adobe CEO Shantanu Nerayan I chatted with scott, a wedding videomaker from Denver. He wants to produce nature videos for iTunes but meanwhile he needs wedding gigs to pay his bills. I don't have that stricture. I don't have much money but have enough to live on if I am frugal. But I don't want to live a frugal life if I can't pursue my dreams. Freud 150 years ago was right. It's a balance between immediate and delayed pleasure. Asian philosophies speak about balancing even pleasure itself with the acceptance of the non-pleasurable aspects of being alive. We can't have just what we want. To get what we want is to acknowledge that getting there would mean going where we don't want to go.

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