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00F-1 |
| Build number: | 00F-1 (lifetime start #185) |
| Date: | January 1 |
| Location: | Venice Breakwater, south side |
| Start: | 0845; building time: 6.5 hours |
| Height: | 4.2 feet |
| Base: | 1.75 feet, cylindric |
| Photography: | safety shots on RA w/WR; 2 TMX120 w/67II and 165; walkaround and stills w/XL1 |
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It is, at last, here. The end of the world. Satellites will fall, water will flow upward, people will riot in the streets and burn the whole world down. Get ready! Year 2000 is here!
1. Nightfall I have to work. The City of Los Angeles wants to be ready; I guess they have a case. If something did go wrong and caught City management unprepared, there would be all kinds of bad news. So, I drive downtown on a quiet freeway. The television monitors show . . . parties. Paris, London, Sydney. Eventually New York. Calgary. The terminator is approaching us, and all we see is people having fun. Fireworks. Showtime. Playtime. Everyone is having a good time. We sit in the Control Center and watch others celebrate. Compared to the festivities elsewhere, Los Angeles lights a wet firecracker. Some dorky lights on the Hollywood sign, a few Roman candles, some bands. Call it Yawn 2K. By 2A I'm back home, six or seven hours earlier than expected. 2. On With the Show! By 8A I've loaded and prepped the trailer. Into the cool morning I ride, south to the beach. I'm very glad to be able to bring in the new year this way. Sculpting goes well. George helps with the piling. The Penguin Swimmers add their silliness to the day; there's no way they'll get me to swim today. The water is just plain cold. There was no plan for the day other than to have a good time, and celebrate no longer living in Kansas or another place where January is bundle-up time and all the water is frozen.
Technical Notes: The images accompanying this report were captured from digital video. I know the quality isn't that great, but it's far better than I expected and good enough for this cataloging purpose. Why use a low-quality format such as video? It saves me a lot of time. I don't have to shoot 35mm at all, and I don't have to scan the negatives. Shooting video gives me many more options: copy the tape and send it to people, edit it into a cohesive compilation, capture frames and use them on the Web. Think of it as a digital camera that shoots 30 720X480 frames per second and saves them to tape. Instead of the two hours required for image eding from 35mm, I can do a suite of six images in about half an hour. Enough said. Anyone who doesn't like it can volunteer to do the scanning. Any takers? <g> I'd rather do sand sculpture. For the technically oriented: The video camera is a Canon XL1. To get the images into my Power Computing Mac clone I have a Sony DVBK-2000 capture card. The card and its software work very well. I control the playback with the software. When I see a good frame, I pause and capture. The software includes a Photoshop plug-in to read the files; I import them and adapt them to the Web. I converted these images to greyscale because the sun had set by the time I shot video and there wasn't very much color. |
All contents copyright 2000 by
Larry Nelson Direct to HTML January 22 | ||||||||||
00f01rpt.htm 2000 January 22