Lofi Video

Daughter from Matt Lumpkin on Vimeo.

A joyful afternoon with my daughter who is growing into someone so complex and wonderful we can hardly bear it.

Lo-fi: Winner

The Answer: We have a winner.  Matthew Geddert guessed that I was shooting these using a digital camera to shoot  the focus screen of an older, medium format film camera.  In this case, a Richoflex, "Twin Lens Reflex" or TLR (as opposed to a single lens reflex or SLR).

The fun things about these cameras, sometimes known as "view cameras" (as seen in Julie and Julia, my wife tells me), is that you look down into them from above which makes them perfect for mounting a digital SLR or point and shoot onto them with an unweildy and unstable piece of cardboard.  They use two lenses because the bottom one puts the image on the film while the top one puts the image on the focus screen.  In your SLR, they get around this by having the mirror that reflects the lens image up 90 degrees to your focus screen flip up and out of the way when the shutter releases.


I'm having no end of fun with the grainy, dirty square images it produces.  Even more fun is shooting video through it.  The shallow depth of field and manual focus makes it feel like old super 8.  Hopefully more video to post later.

Update: In the mean time Geddert wins his very own iPod refrigerator magnet.  This is essentially an old, broken iPod with a large magnet inside.  Impress your friends!  I'll mail it or send it via mutual-friend post.

Lo-fi

Photo riddle: figure our what's going on here and win a prize.
Hint: no digital post-process involved.

A Note for Americans (and for Christians) About the Proposed Manhattan Mosque

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I don't generally consider blogs to be an ideal forum for charitable conversation, however, I feel so strongly about this I feel compelled to say what I think and offer to read your responses with the same grace and charity which I hope you will extend to my words.

For Americans:
Whenever people and nations go through traumatic times they face a choice. How do we integrate what has happened into the rest of the story of our lives? Do we let it make us angry and afraid? Bitter and reactionary? Or do we find a way to weave our hard and painful experiences it into the arc of who we have been and who we want to be?

After 9/11 all Americans faced this choice and we continue to face it today. I understand that the suffering, trauma and loss of both the families who lost loved ones and the rest of America is real and painful, even today. But we must choose not to be defined by that experience.

As we consider who we as a nation have been and would like to be in the context of the proposed Muslim Community Center in Manhattan, we can turn to the story of what America has been in the past: a place where, just up the coast in Boston and Providence people journeyed across oceans to carve out a space for themselves and their families to live out their faith in accord with their own consciences, free from the interference of the religious and political majority who had not let them worship as they wished or build churches where they wished.

This is why I agree with President Obama that this is an issue of freedom of religion that goes back to the core of who we have been as a nation. We now get to choose:

Will we let 9/11 change who we have been, because we still live with the scar of ground zero?   Or will we remember who we have been, join our future to our past and demonstrate that we can live out what we claim to believe.

--
For Christians:
I have intentionally not made any arguments from within my own Christian faith. This is because I believe this question is a live one for all Americans, not just Christians. That said, we as Christians may want to consider what our Lord's command to love our neighbors as ourselves might suggest in this case.

Button Music

Guitarish by mattlumpkin

Music is one of the great joys of my life.  I started playing guitar when I was 12 and I started playing computer a couple of years after that.  I got started with a terrible little multi-track recorder I found online but soon graduated the fantastically powerful Cool Edit Pro (for which I have still not found an equivalent in Mac OS).

I was in a terrible little band in high school and we had fun. But I didn't want to wait around for other people to show up to make music and growing up on a farm in rural Arkansas, there weren't that many people lining up to realize my visions of blending big-beat house with modern guitar rock.  In 1999 I learned to program drums in Fruity Loops and began to genuinely have fun collaging beats and drum sounds I sampled from my own CD collection with found sound from High School and the ubiquitous doom-sayers of the impending Y2K apocalypse.

There's still a big disconnect between the music I make when I play my computer and the music I make when I play my guitar. But if you listen to the track above, you can hear me playing guitar sounds with my computer, (that is, with my budget "monome," button grid interface running a sampling program called mlrV).

Integration is fun!