2 posts tagged “ride”
Oh, did I not mention that this new digital still camera of mine actually shoots full-motion, full-sound, low-light-capable videos too? It does! In fact, with the 4-gig memory card I currently have in there, I can technically shoot a full half-hour of such video before having to sync with a computer, at a quality even higher than what you're seeing here (but more on that in a moment). Yes, I know, ever since getting this camera, I've been raving about stuff that a whole lot of other people now take for granted with their digital media devices (and I'm sure to keep doing a lot more); but all this crap is new to me, damnit, and I'm simply astounded by the quality these tiny little decently-priced little devices all have! What you're looking at above, for example, is WAY MORE than enough quality I need for most of the amateur videos I will be shooting in my life -- artistic events, holidays, little mise-en-scenes like you're seeing here -- a quality at least as good as old tape-based videocameras from the '90s, back when they were the only home option available; and since you have just an insane amount of manual controls over that video image as it comes in, too, plus a device that automatically makes a series of "smart adjustments" to whatever conditions it's in, technically you're actually recording a better-quality video than most '90s tape-based cameras, not simply equal.
All us multimedia artists were dying to each own such a videocamera back in the '90s; and the lucky friends of mine who actually did ended up shelling out $500, $600, $700 or more for the privilege, and of course don't forget still with no way to actually edit such videos at home. So how absolutely mindblowing, I think, that this ability now essentially serves as a little-advertised freebie fringe benefit of purchasing what is mostly advertised as a still-image camera, with photographs that are literally five times higher in quality than what you're seeing here; and now combine that with the fact that all these functions all wrapped together in one device still costs less than $200, and can be slipped into your pants pocket. And now add to THAT that you can now cut all these videos together on your home computer, in a way almost as professional as full-time studios, with software that comes for freaking free when you buy the operating system. BLERGH. Careful, don't slip on all my brain pieces splattered across the floor.
If you're under 30 and take all this stuff for granted; SHAME ON YOU, or I guess congratulations for living in a wonderful brave new world of the arts, and how I wish I could put you in a time machine and bring you back to the '80s when I was in high school and college, and access to even the most basic professional equipment was such a privilege and rare pleasure and something you would literally beg, borrow, steal or whore yourself to keep getting to use. No wonder there are tens of millions of people in this country now releasing their own short videos and movies on a regular basis; I guarantee you there'd be that many doing it twenty years ago too, if simply all this technology had existed then as well.
*Oh, and the technical note I was going to mention as well: For those doing research about the S550 and who have come across this randomly, know that the camera originally outputs videos in a Quicktime/Mac-friendly AVI format, 640 x 480 pixels, at a fairly high 1 megabyte per second of footage; the 33-second video today, for example, was originally 33 megs in size when first coming out of the camera. I then not only compressed it into an MP4, but also lopped off the top and bottom to make it 16:9-friendly; that brought the total size down to a much more reasonable 6 megabytes, but of course also dropped the quality quite a bit. I don't mind so much, because I knew I was only going to distribute it as a much smaller streaming video online; but do understand that this video looks dramatically better when watching the original AVI on a television screen.
Okay, the backstory once again, for anyone who needs it...
In 2005, for the first time since college, I took possession again of a bicycle -- partly because of my first-ever trip to Amsterdam the year before, partly because of the very political and outspoken bicycling community here in Chicago, partly because of my growing dissatisfaction with the Chicago Transit Authority, partly because of my desire to get more exercise in my life. The main goal when first getting the bike two years ago was to eventually make all of my neighborhood trips and nearby ones with it, whenever the weather was nice enough; and two years later, I've indeed gotten myself into the habit almost daily.
Last month, however, I turned 38 years old, and realized that I wanted my body to be in a certain shape by the time I turn 40; this resulted in me giving myself a series of physical challenges this year, such as to finally finish up my dental work, quit smoking, gain 40 pounds and the like. Along with everything else, one of the challenges was to expand the amount of bicycling I do, now that I've quit smoking and can take on such a challenge for the first time; to not only put in three to six miles a day (5 to 10 km) on any day it gets over 60 degrees (15 C), but also every couple of weeks put in a 10- to 30-mile ride (15 to 50 km), most of the time tied to something of interest that just happens to be that far away from my apartment. (Hey, there's a lot of interesting things in a 10- to 30-mile radius of Chicago, believe me; why, the city itself is 30 miles long to begin with.) It's not a length I expect to churn out on a regular basis, at least not this summer; it'd be nice, though, to get at least six or so such lengthy rides under my belt by the time Labor Day rolls around, and for such distances as five miles or so (or from my place to the Loop, in other words) to not really even faze me anymore. And as I've discovered even at this early date, quitting the cigarettes is going to help this process even more than I had supposed.
Anyway, figured I'd put off any 30-mile rides until late this summer, after a couple of months of working up to it; but definitely sometime around Memorial Day (the unofficial start of the summer here in the US), I thought it'd be fun to get a 10- to 15-mile ride in (15 to 20 km), probably just one way and then taking the train back home. But where to go? Hmm, hmm, hmm! And then, and then I stumbled onto some information that I had never known, not once in the entire 13 years I've now lived in Chicago; that tucked away in the corner of one of our city parks here is a full-fledged, nationally-known historical Japanese "stroll" style garden. Wow! Did you know that Chicago has one of the larger and more historically significant Japanese stroll gardens in America? I certainly didn't, even though I'm a huge fan and annual visitor of one of the other largest in America, which happens to be down in St. Louis where I grew up, at the St. Louis Botanical Gardens. (They throw an annual gala Japanese Festival, in fact, that my family used to attend each year when I was growing up.)
Chicago's Japanese garden, in fact (known officially as Osaka Garden, after one of our sister cities -- but more on that in a bit), has this long and utterly fascinating history to it, leading me to wonder even more how I could've gone this long without ever hearing of it. Turns out that the entire thing is a grand leftover from the World's Fair of 1893, held at the same exact spot (Jackson Park, that is, down on the south side of the city, where the current Museum of Science and Industry is located); Japan, in fact, was the very first foreign country to financially commit to the World's Fair, in return for getting a large chunk of the "wooded island" being planned for the south side of the fairgrounds. (This yield was a bit contentious, in fact; the island had been originally designed as a place of refuge and peace for frazzled fairgoers, and was only given over to the Japanese after Daniel Burnham himself stepped in and made the deal go through.)
As these things happen, the Japanese garden ended up sticking around after the World's Fair, as did a handful of other structures (such as the building the museum is now in); it generally fell into disrepair, though, as America's relationship with Japan soured as well, leading to a vandal-caused fire on the eve of World War II. That plus white flight of Hyde Park after the war pretty much turned Wooded Island into an abandoned section of the city; the once fabled Japanese garden was quickly taken over by nature again, forgotten by the citizens who lived so near to it.
In the 1960s and '70s, though, a series of efforts to revitalize the communities brought the parks of the area back into focus; partly because of a series of famed bird walks through the island, the abandoned structures of the Japanese garden were rediscovered by the neighborhood locals, and eventually reclaimed by the Chicago Parks Department. This happened to be at the same time that Chicago was getting serious about its now-famed sister-city program; in particular this was when a lot of cooperative work was being done between it and Osaka, Japan. As a result of the partnership, the Asian city ended up donating over $250,000 in fauna and structures to the garden; in gratitude, the Chicago city council renamed the site "Osaka Garden." And apparently the garden's been a hot destination ever since; in fact, in 2002 the entire area went through yet again another major facelift.
Anyway, the garden is only 15 miles from my apartment, once you factor in biking over to the el stop afterwards; at my current biking rate, that's roughly a 60- to 90-minute one-way trip for me, not too taxing at all. If I did it in the morning, then, I could make a whole day out of visiting the two big parks down there (Jackson and Washington), including Osaka Garden, and maybe catch lunch with my friend Carrie Golus who lives in the neighborhood. Hmm! It's not a bad plan, to tell you the truth; just far enough to challenge me, not far enough to overwhelm me, with no long return trip to dread at the end of the day, and with a chance to visit a major Japanese stroll garden I never even knew existed (and with me being a big fan of Japanese stroll gardens already). And with lots of photos I'd get out of such a trip, and my first excuse to finally make a Google mash-up map, and a chance to get a lot of sun and exercise, etc etc.
Yeah, yeah! So okay, I think I'm going to make this my official Memorial Day trip, so as to actually have an excuse to get out of my house on the holiday, and to kick off my official summer of bicycling a lot more than I ever have before. Oh, I think I'm excited!
More:
Osaka Garden
Jackson Park
Washington Park
Chicago Park District (official website)
Chicago lakefront bike path (maps)
Chicago lakefront bike path (tips)
1893 World's Fair
