I loathed field day when I was a kid, but undokai, the Japanese variant, is actually pretty fun. They practice lots of different kinds of dances and stunts, and the oldest kids at our particular daycare put on a great drum routine (which you’ll have to wait until next year to see).
Here is Genbo (he’s the tall white one in yellow shoes) dancing with his class.
I’ve been meaning to share this video for a long time now, but only recently has my computer miraculously become able to edit video without freezing. This is some dancing from the summer festival at our daycare, described here. In this video the kids are carrying around o-mikoshi, which are little portable houses for the gods or spirits (kind of like the Ark of the Covenant in the first Indiana Jones movie). About halfway through the video switches to them dancing around the little arks.
I’m not sure to what extent this whole Shinto-inspired ritual is dependent on the fact that our daycare is part of a huge Shinto shrine. There may be some non-Shinto-affiliated daycares that do this at their own festivals, but probably not so elaborately.
Many thanks to Jeffrey for loaning me his extremely nice tripod and for fixing my blog (again), after the whole thing mysteriously disappeared today. (Note to self: Back up, schmuck.)
Took this near daycare, in the midst of a light drizzle of snow. Had a lot of fun experimenting with the very thin DOF on my ZF 100/2 while taking the video. Having the tripod sure does allow for more creative possibilities, both in terms of video and stills.
Just seeing the level at which this equipment performs (irrespective of the skill of the operator) is enough to send shivers up my camera-geek spine, kind of like how listening to the revving motor of a ’53 MG would for a different demographic.
Tonight I’ve been fooling around with iMovie, playing around with editing my D90 video. Below is a little something I just put together from footage (interesting archaic term that, from when motion pictures were captured on lengths of film!) taken from my balcony. I handheld it, and this isn’t a bad effort for that, but I really would like to get a decent tripod with a video head for panning. It will have to wait, though. The music is me playing the intro to a piece called Izumoji on shakuhachi.
Here and here. It seems as though posting embedded video causes some people’s computers to crash, so until I get it straightened out I’ll just post links. I’ve also temporarily taken down the video of the Otsu festival, since that post was the trouble-maker.
So, I sold my venerable Fuji S5 Pro. I was very sentimentally attached to it, as it’s a great people camera that I bought it expressly to shoot my kids with. However, Nikon came out with something I couldn’t resist. The new D90 takes video, and is the first SLR in the world to do so (Canon has a new camera that does as well, but it’s not on sale yet and costs more than twice as much).
The S5 had great dynamic range and skin tones, which I loved. The D90 has better resolution, speed, high-ISO performance, and video. It was worth trading in the S5 and a lens. I’m not ordinarily big on video per se, but with Genbo and Zoe so young it seemed like a perfect fit. There are some times when video does justice to young kids more than photos, and although I have a video camera, like 99% of video camera owners it stays in the closet all the time.
This is part of the reason I have not posted in so long. I’ve been figuring out my new camera. At the same time I’m switching from Aperture to Lightroom, and transferring all my photos is a huge pain. Aperture is nice and I have no complaints, but a friend of mine is a Lightroom developer and made me an offer of free lifetime personalized support, including coming over to my house late at night to fix any inconsequential problem that might arise. And, I’ve always thought Lightroom had a slicker interface. So.
