What's You're Favorite Inspirational Song?

You'd think with only 12 notes in the common music scale (17 if you count the flats ) they'd run out unique songs by now. But still new songs keep popping up like dandelions on a freshly mowed lawn. Like panning for gold, every once in a while among the dirt and sand you find a bright and shiny song that holds a lot of personal value to you. The power of these inspirational songs is found in the intersection of personal knowledge/experience, lyrics, musical composition and performance.

With technology the way it is today, we've been lucky to purchase individual songs online to gather a nice collection of personally inspirational music. Below are a few nuggets of gold I've come across lately. I have a lot favorites, but here's one (sometmes two) for each day I'm gone so you can listen to one each day until I get back...or if you are in the mood and its quiet and peaceful and you want to sit back and just listen to some good lyrics and music, you can play them all:



Mark Schultz -- "Walking Her Home" I love songs that capture the eternal nature husband-wife relationships.



Mark Schultz -- "Everything To Me" The lyrics of this song beautifully capture the heroin-ism of choosing adoption when it's what is best for the child.




Ernie Haase & Signature Sound--"Then Came The Morning" This male Christian quartet has incredible blend and power in their singing (you have to if you're going to sing that high without leaving your chest voice.) Excellent voices. The music behind them is well-arranged and accents the feel of the song quite well. Generally, for me, this type of instrumentation detracts from the sacredness of the message, but this particular song, in a unique way, seems to fit well where the song and personal feelings merge. The music, lyrics, harmony, melody and power portrays the hope and happiness of the message.




Trace Atkins - "Arlington" One's selfless and willingness to sacrifice for the freedom of other's always inspires me. The first-person lyrics and the presentation of this song give me the chills when I listen to it.



Luther Vandross -- "Dance With My Father" The sincerity and love portrayed by Luther in this song/prayer is un-matched. Even 'remakes' can't match it.



Emerson Drive -- "Moments" The worth of souls is great! The lyrics are good, but the video adds something to the lyrics.

Guest Blogger: K (5-yrs-old)

(Spoken by 'K'; typed by dad)

Star Wars Blog:

I want a picture of R2:

I want Star Wars fruit snacks...'cause then they would have R2, lightsabre, and Yoda and Luke....and a gun!

I know another thing I would like: Star Wars Lasagna. Luke-shaped eggs.


A rainbow toy light sabre. Um....and Luke clothes for next time its Halloween and Luke boots. I'm gonna have Luke boots. And a toy Luke light sabre. And a pocket thingy to put my light sabre in. Now I could be Luke for Halloween. And a toy gun that's Luke's.

I wanna real R2 robot. And another robot named 3PO.

Um...a Star Wars TV Show where everyone gets trapped, except for Luke, and Luke has to save them. And then another movie that's the Christmas Star Wars.

Um....Um.....Ah...Oh, yeah. A new TV with pictures of Luke all around it. And another TV with R2 all around. And another TV with Han all around it.

A computer game where you have to be Luke and Luke has to save his friends. Except for one...one who gets to be his buddy! And R2 is Luke's buddy.

And now another game is Christmas, where Luke saves Christmas by saving everyone and destroying all the bad guys.

Um...Um, a picture to print out that's a picture of all of them in the forest place, where they get to go on those hover things.

Um...ummmmah...ummmah...um...aaah...um...oh, yeah! A pencil with Luke and R2 on.

Guest Blogger: T (7-yrs-old)

Bowser turnd yoshis islend into a dark worold. thers a blue yoshi and a red yoshi and a yelow yoshi and a green yoshi.

you can throw eggs at the bubels with fruit in them. it,s cool

K vs. The Drinking Fountain

Here's for those of you who need a smile today. This is a video of my 5-yr-old trying to get a drink from a Drinking fountain. If the raw video doesn't make you laugh, the recording of my now 8-yr-old laughing as a baby will.

...Worth A Thousand Words

Where's This Place? The Answer

What gave it away? Well, I guess there's no pulling the wool over anyones eye's with that shot. And I guess we know what my 10-year-old son thinks about it (i.e.--Mt. Snore!)








Yes, that is a macro shot of the top of one of the jetty rocks when my boys and I were exploring the natural tide pool zoo. Its kind of fun too imagine you are on top of a mountain. What interesting plant life with a coating of ice. Maybe you could skate on that Lake....

I've always liked looking at "perspective pictures." Pictures that look like the viewer is in a different position than he/she really is: maybe it's a new world, or it's lookin up when it looks like it's looking down, is it part of a bigger picture, or is it real size? I also like pictures that let you look from a different perspective: What if you were a bug, what would the world look like. (Granted flying eagle perspectives are little boring sometimes because you can't see as much detail as an Eagle. But satellite Shots...that's interesting.)

Note: I've been working on making my picture size smaller for the blog to reduce page-load time. I thought the blogger automatically shrunk the file size, but it looks like that might not be the case--as you can tell when you click on a picture. Basically if the majority of computer screen sizes are set to 1024 x 768 or 800 x 600 pixels, then the pictures only need to be 1024 pixels wide at the most. The pictures above are 800 pixels wide (which fills most of the screen) and less than 100kb in size compared to previous posts where the file size was usually between 1 and 2 mb.

Computer resolutions have a 'terminal velocity' for picture quality, so the only thing larger file sizes do is make the picture super large (which is nice for looking at close-ups of texture pictures, though.) The advantage of large file sizes with digital cameras is the abilility to crop and still maintain detail and/or not having fuzzy/or pixely blown-up shots when you print them on paper.

Oceancolor Painting

Above is an attempted watercolor adaptation of the Arcadia Beach (Oregon Coast) sunset picture (shown below). It was the first water color I've done since High School.

One thing I notice about watercolors (other than, by nature, its kind of a visually clumbsy and/or light & delicate) is you kind of have to adapt if, for example, you make the bird too big. :-)

If you step back a few hundred feet and take off your glasses, the painting almost looks real. :-)

Where's This Place ?

Can you name from what mountain range this picture was taken? How about what state in which it is located? How about the season? Do you recognize that lake?

Stay tuned for the answer...

Things Hiding in Dark, Damp Places

I got some good ideas from my previous blog about getting good every-day event pictures. Basically, thinking back, I am pretty stingy about how much 'film' I use. I wait for a good picture and the moment passes while I'm setting up the frame. So I will practice taking more pictures more often and sort out the bad or vacant expressions (or use them for news articles.)

Also, I hope you enjoy my son's guest blog. He just picked a picture from a website about his favorite video game (Legend of Zelda) and attempted to write about it. But its fun for me to see him struggle through spelling and trying to write what he is thinking, and then feel good about his accomplishment.

The other day, I took the boys for walk on the beach...the South Jetty dividing the Ocean and the Columbia River at the most Northwest point in Oregon. The tide was very low and we looked in between the rocks to see what we could find:

Some of the creepiest things we encountered during our adventure were things quickly skittering under our feet into the nearest available crack in the rocks. I cropped a close-up of one of the monsters.

Then we quickly learned to steer clear of the pecking-beaked sea snakes that were constantly poking out of their holes nipping at us as we scaled the giant Jetty Rocks.

OK, so they actually didn't move and they aren't snakes, but I thought this picture looked kind of cool and scary all at the same time. I think they have little 'tongues' that come out, grab food out water when the tides in. I didn't stay to find out for sure, though--something about being trapped between giant ocean waves and multi-ton boulders kind of dampened the desire.


Then we had to watch out for the stinging seaflowers of death that sat so innocently waiting in the water for a careless googler to step into its trap.

Actually they were only about the size what quarter and the kids were throwing poor little sea snails at them to see if the anemones would eat them. All they did was fold in their soft, harmless, spiky-looking things inside to protect themselves.

Before long we encountered the Hissing Poison Beetle, able to spray a deadly poison at its enemies to paralyze them until it could get them with its vicious jaws.

Actually, this beetle was about the size of a Brazil nut and it really did hiss when we bothered it. I told the boys that maybe it was spraying poison which kind of freaked them out. So after they stopped panicking and I stopped laughing I confessed that it probably wasn't spraying Poison.



Finally we came across the shooting spike pillow flower which sits so innocent and soft-looking in the field until an unsuspecting wanderer approaches and then...

Actually I placed the yellow flowers on the ground next to the dandelion to add some color to the picture.

All in All it was a fun adventure. And it was great spending time with the boys.

Guest Blogger: My Seven-Year-Old Son

hertcontainer. this is a heartcontainer. what does it do? the heartcontainer,s are in Ocarina of Time. heartcontainer,s look weird.

The Ultimate Photography Challenge

Tonight I had an epiphany about photography: the ultimate challenge in photography is to take a normal every day event and get good, interesting, and/or artistic pictures out of it. That must be why you almost only see pictures of celebrities posing at 'the red carpet preview, post-view private party' instead of party 'action' shots. And that's also why you always see the goofiest pictures of polititions in news articles. Typical news media techniques: make the celebrities look special and make the politicians look like clowns.

Anyway, tonight I was the designated photographer at our sons' Cub Scout Pinewood Derby race. My goal was to get some good pictures of the boys and try to capture their excitement. The facial expressions tell most of the stories, so I like to get close shots of their faces (and it reduces the need for a magnifying glass to see which head is on which blue shirt.) However, capturing a good, unposed, interesting facial expression is like trying to do a macro shot of a drugged-up housefly trapped in a 27 cubic foot glass cube sitting outside.

Usually normal everyday event photos, the kind that fill-up millions of family photo albums around the world look like this...

...no one paying attention, including the person looking at the photo.

Or another classic event photo...
...the "I just noticed the camera while I was in the middle of doing something" look, complete with red eye (which fortunately doesn't show up very well in this picture).

Then there are these types of event photos...

...where you get the combination of the two.

So there lies the challenge--especially with how often everyday events occur: getting good, interesting un-posed pictures at your everyday event. Please share with us if you have any tips, techniques, or luck that works well for event pictures.

I guess even posed pictures don't always work either. :-)

Artsy

Before I got involved with music, much of my creative focus was on art. These are some of the artwork pieces I did in High School art class. (Can you tell, I'm stretching for blog content?)

This is a self-portrait....well at least of my hand.

Watercolor is one of my favorite mediums. Unfortunately all but one of my watercolors was given away to other people.

This is actually a drawing of someone else's drawing. I could never draw something from scratch like this.

We'll work on getting more interesting material on my blog in the near future. Its been a while since of put new content and I was in a hurry, so I threw this in to stall until I have some more interesting material.

Cheap Sound Bytes

I learned in High School that I could turn headphones into microphones by sticking them in the Mic In slot on a tape player. I also learned I could record some singing, play it back on one side of a dual cassette player and record harmony over the top of the first part on the record side of the cassette player. I did my first solo four-part harmony recording with my College Roommate's dual cassette player and some cheap headphones. It sounded like someone singing through a set of tin can and string 'telephones,' but for me it was still a ground-breaking technique for creating cheap music.

Later down the road for a wedding gift, we got a dual cassette stereo with a Karaoke feature which allowed me to use cheap microphones (that were actually built as microphones) to record four-part harmonies by myself. This time it sounded like talking through a wrapping paper tube instead of a tin can telephone. But nonetheless, it was still a fun experiment for me.

Not quite 10 years later, I came across Audacity, which is a free, powerful sound recorder/editor which allowed me to transfer the tape to the computer, remove the noise and enhance the sound (as well as possible given the poor quality of the raw material.) Below you can hear a sampler of my experiments (I will apologize in advance...believe it or not, this actually contains the "best" snippets I had):

Coast Through My Neighborhood

I've enjoyed doing my blog so far. I've learned to incorporate almost every common media. You thought I was just giving some variety to my blog, but in reality I was selfishly using it to learn something new. And yes, I was trying to add a little variety too. Its fun learning how to utilize resources to their potential.

Its so great living in the Northwest--Its beauty is unmatched.

Tiny Green Froggy. My youngest son (3 yrs) found this at our picnic this past weekend. They are cute as little tiny things, but I think an antonym of 'cute' would be more appropriate if they were human size.

It's hard to beat sunsets on the West Coast. One of the things I like about living on the coast is the sun goes down so late. In the summer, you can often see the light from the sunken sun past 10 pm.

You also can't beat the cloud affects nature displays on the coast.

Throw in some rocks to entertain the waves, and you have a place full of eye candy.

Pure Harmony From A Church Youth Trip

First of all I need to apologize to all the people who read my blog. The three of you probably looked at the site disappointed to see no new material over the last few days. We went to an annual family picnic over the weekend, but I am back now.

In high school, I was recruited as the last member of a four-guy a capella vocal group. One of my best friends was the bass for the group and he heard me sing to the radio on a church youth trip. We became Pure Harmony.

As Pure Harmony, we would harmonize on the bus as we travelled to Vocal Jazz contests. We sang for receptions and parties. We sang the national anthem for basketball games. We even sang for our High School graduation.

This same friend of mine introduced me to a new music-making life. He also introduced me to Vocal Jazz and Concert Choir all of which shaped my musical tastes tremendously. Our Vocal Jazz Choir often placed or came close to placing at Vocal Jazz contests.

Once at Especially For Youth (a Church Youth Conference), my friend, one of our mutual friends, a friend we met at the conference, and I sang at a talent show in front of a few hundred youth. We started out in unison, then as soon as we split into harmony, the crowd went wild. Hence my claim that I was able to sing in front of a crowd of screaming fans.

Those were the 'Glory Days!'

In all technical and musical terms, we were a step below amateurs, but it was still fun, provided a lot of good memories, and influenced me in many ways. In fact I considered becoming a music major in college.

All this because I went on a church youth trip and a friend motivated me to develop a seed of talent.

Our Dependence on Independence Day

A divinely organized miracle took place 231 years ago which has made one of the most extensive and enduring impacts on the world in its whole history of existence. On July 4th 1776, the Congress of the United States of America declared its independence from Britain and a new country was born--founded with the philosophy that "all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." (Declaration of Independence)

Through the last 231 years our freedoms have been gratefully treasured, painfully challenged and, especially at times of greatest prosperity, taken for granted. Our ability to do what we choose in this country is dependent on upholding the principles established on that first Independence Day.

At the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the unified goal was set and the commitment was made to establish a land of freedom: "And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor." (Declaration of Independence) At the signing of the Declaration of Independence, these hopeful leaders suddenly became enemies to the most powerful nation in the world. They gave their all, figuratively and literally to stand firm in their commitment to the success of this new country. God helped them prevail. Through costly growing pains, threats on its existence, and even dents by its own people over the last 231 years, this nation presses forward under the same principles on which it was founded.

As a result we are free! The government was established--the checks, balances, and protections were set in place to allow us the freedom and accountability to choose for ourselves. We may choose to live free or we may choose to live in self-inflicted bondage. The only thing we don't choose is the consequence of our actions. Freedom is so risky for the individual--to have no scape goat for our actions. However, freedom to choose for ourselves is so valuable its benefits out-weigh any risk.

With respect for God and these men who sacrificed everything to give freedom to those who live in this great nation 231 years later, I hope I will never take for granted the freedom I have. I pray that I will make personal decisions that will keep me free on the everyday battle field of choices.

Videography

Not only am I interested in the technical aspects of taking pictures, I also like experimenting with video. In fact CNET.com had some really good, free online courses for photography and video making. They still have good courses, they just aren't as in-depth as they used to be. This short movie from a few years ago is the first video I made since High School. It was motivated by a CNET course I was taking at the time.

Our first digital camera was capable of taking 20 second videos (no sound) @ 20 frames per second. Generally movies are 24 frames per second (fps) or, more commonly in the US, 30 fps. I took several 20 second shots then edited them down. I tried to set up the environment with a long shot, then tried to capture the inside world of my son putting together a puzzle--even if it didn't have all the pieces.

Point and Wonders

Part of what inspired me to do this blog is chillpix's blog page. Chillpix doesn't claim to be professional but enjoys experimenting with his camera and posting them on the blog for feedback, ideas and just to share. In my opinion he has some really good pictures.

Photography is something I really enjoy. I have no formal training in photography other than some online research and trying different things with the camera. I've never had a really good camera...just some inexpensive, yet decent point-and-shoot cameras. However, I've maximized its ability by reading the manual to see just what the tool can do, then I practice with different picture compositions and different software editing programs. That's the great thing about digital photography--you can afford to goof-up.

Although, software can't really save a bad photo, it can do a lot of things to mostly improve the way the camera affected the picture, but also to touch-up some blemishes from whatever cause. Most of the time we use the software for things such as cropping out the finger on the edge of the picture, removing red eye, instant facial blemish removal, adjusting the contrast for more solid color and less wash-out (follow the steps on a DVD THX optimization wizard, usually found in the setup menu option of a THX dvd. This will give you a feel for what proper contrast looks like,) and adjusting the color for more natural color. We have some decent photo-editing software which allows us to makes some cosmetic enhancement to the pictures. One of my favorites is Gimp. A powerful, yet free, photo-editing program comparable to Adobe Photoshop.

By the way, the picture behind the blog title actually is a picture of our back yard...and those are real deer. We don't have a big yard, but we have enough foliage to make it look bigger than it really is--then add the deer (who unfortunately don't come around much any more) make it look more wild than it really is. The picture of Peter Iredale is one of my favorites because of the perspective--plus it rarely gets uncovered like that--its usually buried further in the sand.

Here are some more of my favorite pictures:

Dandilion Hosting an Ant. This is done with the macro setting. I really like pictures with depth: when the background is blurry and the subject is crystal clear. I also like the bold, simple color contrasts in this particular picture.

Stick the dandilion above in a popcorn popper, and this is what you get. I've always liked dandilion-fluff pictures, because they challenge the focus. All of the little intricate details of the seed's parachutes provide a lot of clean texture when they are in focus. Again the depth and the contrasting colors along with the detail make it fun to look at. Unfortunately, macro pictures with this clarity and depth seem to be more accidents than the norm with our camera. Not to mention the luck of finding a dandilion with fluff intact.

Sparkling Apple Cider is one of our favorite beverages--it makes me thirsty just thinking about the cool, sweet apple juice flavor with the tiny carbonation bubbles that accentuate the flavor rather than cover it up like sodas do. Okay I digress from my topic. This is a more recent picture/experiment with a new point-and-shoot camera we bought a few months ago. I did this one with a tripod and no flash. I incorporated 3-point lighting, which tends to make the subject look more natural. Basically you have the main lighting, then you throw in some some dimmer side lighting to reduce harsh shadows (like the ones you usually get with a flash), finally you throw in some back lighting which provides a little outline of the subject and sets it apart from the background. In this particular picture the side light (from the left) prevents silhouetting from the candle. I thought the back light turned-out pretty well, although pretty weak--its the blue light/reflection from the computer monitor. I thought it added a nice accent having a cool color highlight to contrast with the warm orange tones.

I Gave In...

My wife is an avid blogger--has been for almost a year now. She has a lot of blogger friends now and has mastered most of the editing features of blogging.

For the longest time I prided myself in resisting any desire to start one of my own. After all, why should I spend so much time posting things that no one else would really care about? I almost had a goal of not starting one of these just to go against the grain of this popular social network in our technological world.

They say if you try to cook a frog by throwing it in boiling water, it just jumps out; but if you put it in cold water and slowly turn up the heat, before it knows it, it knows not. For me, I started reading my wife's blogs. Then I started enjoying reading the comments people left on her blog--I even left a couple comments of my own periodically. Before long I would look at the blogs of those who posted comments on my wife's blogs. Finally more of my friends started blogs and gave me some ideas.

So I eventually gave in and joined the blogger's world. I figure its a great place to throw a bunch of miscellaneous stuff. But, fair warning, don't expect much excitement from this blog--it will likely match my personality.