10 posts tagged “video”

I just got back to Chicago a couple of hours ago, not long enough yet to have actually gotten out and done anything, and hence taken some photos along the way with my brand-new Nikon Coolpix S550, which I received a few days ago as an early Christmas gift from my parents down in suburban St. Louis, specifically so I could go out with them and actually help pick it out; but I did shoot a 30-second video during the plane ride home earlier, so thought I'd go ahead and upload it while I'm sitting around my place this afternoon unwinding.

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.

(Are you a YouTube person? Here's the link to the YouTube version of this video.)

Greetings, humans! Spring has officially begun here in Chicago, even if the weather hasn't caught up to it yet; it means that not only bicycling season will be starting again soon, but also the goofy little cellphone videos I regularly do during bicycling season, most of which act as supplements to the various bicycle maps I've created for use in both Google Maps and Google Earth. (I'm hoping to ramp up the amount of videos I do this year, in fact; hopefully by the time Labor Day rolls around this September, I will have shot and posted 10 to 15 of them.) Here, my first cellphone video of 2008, shot on opening day of the Chicago Cubs 2008 baseball season, which happens to be the 100th anniversary of the last time the Cubs won the World Series, a historically significant occasion that has already garnered a ton of national press, before the baseball season has even begun. Unfortunately it was a crappy, rainy day today, so I don't have a lot to share from the actual opening-day festivities; rest assured that I will be shooting another video around Wrigley Field later this summer (located, by the way, a mere four blocks from my apartment), giving a better tour of the neighborhood and showing what a more typical game day in the Wrigleyville neighborhood is like. For now, I hope you enjoy.

So, just a few weeks left until it's finally bicycling season again here in Chicago; long-time followers of the moblog, in fact, know that I first got heavily involved with bicycling last year, when not coincidentally I initially quit smoking. Of course, this being nerdy GTD me, I needed to invent an elaborate project for myself in order to justify all that bicycling in the first place; and this was right at the same time (spring 2007) that Google first allowed people to sign up for an account and start creating customized mashup maps through their official API, which convinced me to start doing such a thing too. But alas, because of the complexity of these maps (but more on that in a bit), I ended up doing a lot more trips than I had time to sit down and put together into a mashup; and I promised myself that over the winter I'd finally sit down and finish them, before it was time for bicycling season 2008 and yet more riding/photographing/mapping.

Anyway, it just occurred to me this weekend that I don't have much time left, so I better get started; and the first step, of course, was to sit down and look through all the photos and notes I took last year when actually on the bike trips, and determine exactly how much work I have ahead of me. The good news? It turns out that I actually biked a lot more and a lot farther than I had been remembering in my head, boding well for my chances of even longer and more regular trips this spring and summer. The bad news? I have 11 maps that need to be created, and so far only three of them "done" (and by "done" I of course mean "eh, like 80 percent done").

So, I just sat down on my other Mac (the one with Photoshop) and made a master map of all the mini-projects I'm shooting to finish by the beginning of May; this image, then, will also serve as a master map to interior pages over at the section of my personal website where you can always find the latest grand total of finished mashups. Anyway, so here we go with the descriptions...hold yr breath...

1 through 5: Chicago Lakeshore Path. An uninterrupted 18-mile bike and runner path stretching nearly from the north edge to the south edge of the city, surrounded nearly at all times by public parkland, a holdover from Edwardian times when the "City Beautiful" movement managed to get the entire Chicago lakefront declared a "public resource."

1) Lakeshore path: Lincoln Park North. Upper half of the seven-mile Lincoln Park, one of the largest city parks in the entire United States. Riding the length of Lincoln Park is a lesson in American history and architecture, in that the park was designed in regular stages from 1860 to 1960; here in the north half are the sections created between 1910 and the '60s.

2) Lakeshore path: Lincoln Park South. The lower half of the park just described, the sections designed from 1860 to 1900, containing the vast majority of the historical destinations the park is most known for.

3) Lakeshore path: North Avenue to the Loop. Want a smart alternative the next time you come into the inner city for a holiday like the 4th of July? Why not park your car on the northside and bike the rest of the way in? Although not regularly used by a lot of people, there is a perfectly safe and in fact delightful section of the lakefront path that stretches from the end of Lincoln Park to the Loop, including easy stops at Navy Pier, River North, the Chicago River and Millennium Park. It's only six miles from Montrose to the Loop by bicycle; why not try it the next time you're down there on holiday, avoiding the snarl of vehicular traffic that always forms during such events?

4) Lakeshore path: Loop to 57th Street. For many years the Hyde Park area of the city's southside was built up along the lakefront, but nothing else between there and the Loop; that finally changed throughout the mid-20th century, especially once a series of corporations and civic groups came in and sponsored the landscaping of vast tracts of the land. Although not as historic as the northside's better-known path, this slice of Chicago's lakefront is a beautiful and uncluttered space, perfect for lazy weekend rides as well as weekday wind sprints for more serious riders.

5) Lakeshore path: South Campus. The extreme south tip of the city-sponsored 18-mile lakeshore bike/running path, encompassing several historic areas: Hyde Park, the University of Chicago campus, the Museum of Science and Industry, Jackson Park, and the South Shore Cultural Center, spanning roughly 57th to 79th Streets.

6) Northside to the Loop, via Southport/Lincoln Avenues. Hey, city-dweller creative-class fucks! You know how the mayor and your hippie neighbor keep crowing about how easy it actually is to bicycle from your place to your office in the Loop each day? Keep wondering if it's actually true? Here's one of what will hopefully be an always expanding series of maps, looking at various inner-city routes from residential neighborhoods to the Loop, all of them lying along streets with dedicated, legally-protected bike lanes. Featuring not only the routes themselves, but various practical tips about city bicycling embedded in my photos and videos.

7) Northside to the Loop, via Halsted/Milwaukee Avenues. Exactly the same as map 6, but this time using the city bike lane on Halsted, passing through such neighborhoods as Boys Town, Old Town, Goose Island, Fulton Market, River West and more.

8) Burnham's Boulevards and the West Side Parks (north half). As part of the "City Beautiful" movement's 1909 overhaul of the city, architect Daniel Burnham recommended building a "green ring" through the most congested neighborhoods at the time, allowing not only for rapid middle-class development but also a small slice of healthiness in the middle of the most packed places in the city. At the same time, then, a group of Gilded Age entrepreneurs started a series of grand, giant public parks on the west side of the city as well (where the vast majority of the city's immigrants lived at the time); these were linked to Burnham's green boulevard system, to form a legitimate grand green circle all the way around the city's downtown, a few miles out in distance from the Loop's center. My map, then, is just of the north half of this circle; it includes Diversey Boulevard at Lincoln Park (including the Goethe statue, Hamilton garden, Elks headquarters and more), Logan Square, Garfield Park and more.

9) Northside Neighborhood Parks. It's the giant civic parks of the Victorian Age that get all the press in Chicago; but did you know that the park district here actually maintains over 550 public spaces? The vast majority of them, in fact, were created and first maintained by private neighborhood organizations, before the Great Depression and Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal consolidated all the groups into one unified government administration. In this map, a winding and detailed route that will take a bicyclist to over 65 small neighborhood parks on the northside, ranging from a mile or two in size to sometimes the length of someone's backyard; the total route lasts 25 miles, with of course many opportunities to stop for food, shopping, coffee and more.

10) Northside to the Westside, via the "Industrial District." Here, a supplemental add-on to either map 6 (inner-city path on Lincoln) or 7 (inner-city path on Halsted) for getting over to such hipster westside neighborhoods as Wicker Park and Bucktown, specifically by riding through the last area of the northside left with working factories, smokestacks and more. A fascinating route to take at least once, especially for those who enjoy photographing urban industrial areas.

11) Near South Historic Neighborhoods. Did you know that there are half a dozen nationally important historic neighborhoods all butting against each other in Chicago's Near South Side? There are! Here, a map detailing them all, including the IIT campus, Bronzeville, Prairie Avenue, the Museum Campus, Chinatown, Printers Row and the South Loop.

Whew, okay, that's it! And three of these are now "done," like I said (i.e. 80 percent done), which you can find over here for now; and hopefully by May, like I said, I'm going to have all 11 of these maps finished and online, and with downloadable KMLs as well for Google Earth (for those who like their maps in 3D and spinnable and all that shit), and with a brand-new interface as well over at the section of my personal site where people will be able to find all these. And that's it! See you later, fuckers!

I had some errands to run earlier this week in Lincoln Square, so thought I'd stop at Welles Park and do yet another cellphone-camera video for the collection of bicycle maps for Google Maps and Google Earth I've been compiling this year. This video is specifically for the "northside neighborhood parks" map found there; it talks a little about the history of the neighborhood park program in Chicago, then gives you an overview of Welles Park in particular, an excellent example of a medium-sized community park in a working-class neighborhood.

Are you wondering, by the way, why none of my recent bike videos have shown up on my maps yet, or why no new maps have been posted since early July? Well, that's because I'm too busy actually bicycling these days, while the weather is still warm, plus running my arts organization, the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography, which wasn't open yet earlier this summer when I got the first three maps finished and posted. But in just another two months or so, it's suddenly going to be too cold and nasty again to go bicycling on a regular basis, and will stay that way for another six months or so; I figure better to just go ahead and run around and collect up all the raw data for these maps now, while the weather is still good, then spend the winter slowly getting the rest of the maps done at home while hiding from the cold and snow. That way I'll have a good seven or eight maps ready by next spring, when it'll be time to start bicycling again every day, and with all those map placemarks fully integrated by then into Google Local Search.

Did you know that, by the way? That whenever you create a customized Google map, whenever you add a placemark for a specific situation that contains either text or a photo or audio or video, it gets added to the overall Google Maps database? That way, whenever someone does a search on, say, "Wrigley Field," they'll not only get the official Google search result, but the option to view user-created content as well; and any person on the planet who chooses that option, then, will see your placemark right next to the official Google one. Pretty cool, I have to admit, and pretty smart of Google to add all this precious original content to their overall database.

The obvious goal, then, is that people will also combine Google's SketchUp to this all, a free and easy-to-use CAD/CAM program that allows people to create 3D buildings, then automatically load THEM into Google Earth and the Google database as well. If a chamber of commerce could get their stuff together, for example, they could get all the businesses in their organization to fill out a detailed placemark about themselves, plus get someone to make a fully textured 3D version of the business (or maybe the chamber of commerce hiring some computer geek to do all the buildings at once, hint hint, hint hint). The chamber of commerce, then, could create a customized Google map with all these businesses within it, which could be used in all the following ways...

--Adding to the Google online database, for people to stumble across randomly or while searching on a specific topic;

--As a downloadable Google Earth file, at the chamber of commerce's website;

--As a cool standalone demo for visitors at the chamber of commerce offices, or even city hall;

--As a source of press for those businesses; it's not that often, after all (or yet, anyway), that chambers of commerce  band together and create a media-rich 3D customized map of all their businesses at Google.

This is what I'm trying to do with my bike maps, after all; not only add a little to the overall Google database, to increase the overall value of the info there, but also to drive traffic to my website "long tail" style, ergo the arts center as well, not to mention do a little boosterism for the city of Chicago, not to mention explain a little about my theories concerning city planning and urban renewal. Oh, plus give smart tourists an idea of other things they can do while visiting here besides going down to Navy Fucking Pier, plus give locals ideas for cool day trips they can make right within the city itself, on a boring Sunday where not much of all is going on, without having to worry about hotels or train rides back and the like. See how many different benefits you get from investing once in a technology like this?