The Hall Family Photoblog - December 2011 - David, Joan, Svea, Brigitta & Annika Hall (& Bill and Harriette Wilsterman)

Two weeks ago we hadn't really given our Christmas cards much thought; it seems like we've been behind on everything this year. Although the idea we went with isn't terribly original, we do like the effect and we were able to get the shot we wanted with only an hour of set-up, testing and shooting. To get the lights to glow with intensity I pushed the ISO up to 1250 and opened the f-stop to f2 at 1/60th of a second. I placed a softbox light on either side of us for general lighting. The folks across the street have a million lit up things in their yard, so I positioned our shoot with their display in the background in attempt to achieve bokeh (out of focus) light background. The first shot is a test shot, the last is the shot we used for our card.

Gingerbread Houses

Christmas Eve

Just home from church.

ISO1600, f1.8, 1/100th of a second

Nineteen New Movies

I hadn't edited or uploaded movies since the middle of June.

Yesterday I got caught up and uploaded 19 movies to out Movie Page.


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Jazz Class

12-21-2011 ~ Blog #413

(David)

Yesterday was the "watch day" at Annika's dance class.

Movie Club

My 8th graders very much enjoyed a film dialog editing assignment during the first quarter. They wrote a short two person dialog, filmed the scene from three angles and edited the clips together into a classic/standard "camera on the speaker" dialog. They asked if they could make movies for the rest of the year. I replied that we had too much to cover to do that, but we could have a movie club.

They loved the idea and we now have an "Eighth Grade Movie Club" that includes 32 out of 40 of our eighth graders. For their first "challenge" I wrote an ambiguous script. They could only use the dialog from the script, but could do anything with actions and plot. Yesterday we had our "film festival" and watched all eight movies. They voted on a festival winner, presented awards and the winners even gave acceptance speeches.

Their next movie challenge must involve six costumed characters: a Cowboy, a Nerd, a Ninja, a Pirate, a Princess and a Wizard. The real challenge will be working in one of the following afflictions per character: Always surprised (Eyes bugged out), Head bobber, I surrender! (Arms always up), Only talks out of one side of mouth, Perpetual lip licker and Super-clenched everything (Mr. Constipated). I'm looking forward to what they come up with. We had enough time after our film festival and second movie challenge introduction for them to choose their characters, afflictions and begin writing their scripts.

Ambiguous Script:
What are you doing
Nothing
You done
You’ll know when I’m done
Oh, that’s really nice
You think so
What’s that smell
It always smells like that
So, what do you think of it
Wow, that’s really amazing
Right on
I hear something
I don’t
Why did you do that
I wanted to see what would happen
This might get a little uncomfortable
Yeah right
There it is
Did you mean to do that
Oh yea
Hey, that was weird
I thought you would like that
Wait
Armadillo

* Note that I brought in our stuffed real armadillo for them to use as a prop.

Happy Birthday Brigitta

12-18-2011 ~ Blog #412

(David)

We began Brigitta's weekend of birthday festivities on Thursday with presents and cake followed by her class Christmas concert at school. On Friday night we hosted our first "slumber" party (so inappropriately named) with five of Brigitta's friends over. We will concluded the weekend with a dinner out on Sunday night at the Saffron Patch, our favorite Indian restaurant.