Work

Lots of it. Good for paying for things. Not good for blogging. I'm tired. Good night.

Daddy's Delight

Had a great treat this afternoon. My daughter is down visiting and we got out on the sailboat. The 10% chance of rain actually 10 percented on us a little bit and our sunny sky got kinda grey, but we had a wonderful time together anyway.

How to be good

I just came across this quote from the famous Swedish, scalloped fretboard Strat playing virtuoso:

“The simple truth is that in order to be good, you have to be obsessed.” - Yngwie Malmsteen

That is either a go-for-it motivational message or a cautionary tale depending on how you look at it. I used to tend toward the former and now, as an old beat up fart, to the latter. As the book of Proverbs says, "Consider the cost of building a tower..." It may well be worth it. It may also end up being more than you would have been willing to give if you had been able to see and comprehend the bottom line.

17 Days

...in a row. I made it. I just got home from the last of 17 sraight days of freelance work without a day off. What an amazing run! God has opened doors for me in ways that are quite beyond what is reasonable. Eight different jobs for three different production companies dropped into my calendar like puzzle pieces filling every day but with no conflicts. Well, there were two regular small shoots I had to cancel out of but there were backup people in place for them so there was no inconvenience to the clients. I am so thankful for this work. Ironically, I have had to work hard on my attitude the last few days as I got tired and a bit cranky when working on the most demanding, lowest paying jobs with the poorest equipment that caused technical problems and related stress on all involved. I had to mentally step back and just thank God for the great provision and distance my soul from the troubles that I didn't cause and that really weren't my problem. I've always sacrificed myself (and my family) for the project and it's hard to stop it. But I'm trying.

By the way, last week, that 10 minutes they used my camera the first day was the only time they used it all week. I stood there like window dressing behind the big camera during the sessions and surfed the web and read most of the time between. I did help with the strike on Friday, which was about three intense hours of hard work. But to the best of my memory, I worked the least and got paid the most compared to any working week of my life. It's a boost that is tremendously encouraging to me right now. And now I can take a breath and have some time off with the wonderful gift of knowing I have several good paying gigs already booked for next month. I am sorely tried, but I am also very blessed.

The Fastest Antelope

This morning driving up I-4 to a gig, I passed four state police cars. Two were sitting on the left side of the road with unfortunate targets of their radar guns pulled over and two more were in the median poised to pounce on more victims. I immediately thought of four lions on the Serengeti watching an antelope heard race by. The difference today was that the fastest antelope got pulled down and out of the heard instead of the slowest ones. The safest place to be is in the middle of the pack, cruising along at the same speed as the majority, safety in numbers, not drawing attention or sticking out in any way. I've read that the big cats have a hard time visually picking out one animal from a closely packed heard going by. I've also read that in a closely grouped bunch of cars the radar guns can't really pick out which car is going the fastest and I've even read of people using this as a defense in court to get out of tickets. We, the lucky ones, galloped by the carnage of blood and death and expensive tickets and lost weekends in traffic school and jacked up insurance rates relieved it wasn't us and feeling guilty for being glad about this. And most of us got from point A to point B in one piece this morning.

And that got me thinking further down this line to the way I'm living in general these days. After a lifetime of sticking my neck out, trying to be different, to do something a new way all the time, to attain to noble, extraordinary accomplishments, I'm forced to do things a lot more normally. A lot more the way lots of other people do it.

The extremes of our culture seem to get the attention. If you are on the bottom, you get all kinds of consideration from free cheese to free prescription medicine to perhaps free room and board in one of our fine jails or prisons. On the top of our society there is always someone wanting to sink their teeth in either out of wanting what that person has or a piece of it or of their attention. Or because of jealousy or just wanting to stick it to the man.

Down in the middle among the masses, one doesn't attract much attention, except by chance. The random robbery victim or whatever. But you are generally not singled out. You generally don't get a phone call just because your name is in the phone book unless you are the guy I went to high school with whose last name was Aabot or perhaps if your name is Navin R. Johnson. And if you do your life the way everybody else does, you probably won't become rich and/or famous or take over the world, but there's a good chance you will be able to make a living following in the footsteps of someone else who has made a living the same way.

I used to loathe this idea, but after trading my bird in the hand for the two in the bush and going away empty handed time and time again, I'm ready to just hang onto my one bird, thank you very much. This goes against every self help book and motivational speaker and athletic coach to ever put a sentence together. Average. Mediocre. Commonplace. These are all dirty words in our culture. But it can be a safe place to be and sometimes safe is not a bad place to be.

Wait of the World

A few weeks back I got paid the most money ever in my career for making only two shots. This week it has gone one notch further. I have a five day gig. Yesterday they used my camera for no more than 10 minutes. And I get my full day rate plus an hour and a half of overtime for that. And three great meals. Today I was on standby but the one time they were to use it they decided not to at the very last minute. I didn't make one shot. And I get another day and another hour and a half of overtime. It sounds great, but I think it's going to be a very long week. I got to thinking today about time slowing down when you have to wait for something. That you might be able to approach immortality that way, but have a life nobody would want to live. It's really better to be busy. At least moderately so. To occupy my mind this afternoon and try to maintain some kind of sanity I worked on writing a little piece. I want it to be a song but haven't come up with a tune yet.

Like the first December day
Christmas seems so far away
Mind goes numb and frayed nerves grate
while you hurry up and wait

For the world to go around
Ticking clock the only sound
Hang on as the minutes slow
Wait for what you do not know

Being busy makes time fly
Don't even feel the hours go by
Waiting makes the clock hands crawl
Do they even move at all?

Seems great to get paid to sit
But screaming boredom all day long
The hour hand won't budge a bit
On one such a job I wrote this song, waiting...

For the world to go around
Ticking clock the only sound
Hang on as the minutes slow
Wait for what you do not know

Waiting takes a heavy toll
Weight of the world upon the soul
Waiting for a better day
The sands of time to blow away

You'll be waiting
For the world to go around
Ticking clock the only sound
Hang on as the minutes slow
Wait for what you do not know

Hi def takes over

This was last week's shoot for a corporate sales piece using the Panasonic Varicam. And there's nothing quite like a Chapman dolly on track for smooth moves. The lighting crew was outstanding on this project.

Crocodile Tears

Last Monday, Orlando got a shock. Gatorland, a beloved family run attraction since 1949, had a fire. I was shooting at the Osceola County Board of Commissioners meeting and one of the fire chiefs told us about it. We thought it was gone for good, but only the visitor's center and gift shop complex were destroyed. Most of the park and all but two or three animals escaped the flames. Within days they announced that they would re-open soon. Gatorland will go on!

(And everybody loves Gatorland!)

Employees were sadly pondering their park and their
jobs when I stopped by and snapped this shot.

Yet another

I've probably overdone it with the sailboat pictures, but this moment from Sunday was just so nice.

This is your life...

...are you who you want to be?

-Switchfoot

This statue is in front of an office building we shot in on Saturday.

I've been in some meetings for a pharmaceutical company. Most of the people involved seem to have a sense of and take satisfaction in the aspect of the help their products provide to people in saving and improving lives. But I can't help think about the internal moral conundrum of being in a situation where the more that people suffer unfortunate health problems, the better off the drug company and it's employees becomes. There's a tension there that must be a bit hard to live with sometimes. One of the big sales execs seemed to make no bones about it. He actually spoke excitedly about the great opportunities in "the breast cancer market." I was taken aback. But he was an exception. Most of the speakers were true believers in the noble nature of their profession. They had some great stories about the aleviation of great suffering. You have to give the company credit for that. And the fact that a tremendous amount of research, development, money, and government red tape goes into coming up with formulaes that may or may not work and even if they do, they get to profit from them for a limited number of years before they become generic and relatively worthless. All the same, the money these companies and their sales reps make is mind boggling.

Long Glass

I'm working a corporate show this week with only one camera. It's at the back of the room and has a big 55 to 1 zoom on it like the ones used for sports. I have only rarely used this type of lens. You need a really big heavy tripod head to keep it stable at the high magnification. I'm told they have ones that are 93 to 1 now that make this one look small.

Perfect Day

Today was a perfect day in central Florida. The kind of day this state is famous for. I was thinking once again about how amazing it is that this earth is hanging in space just the right distance from the sun, spinning at just the right speed on just the right axis that the temperature range here makes it possible for us to live. This is no small thing. In space the temperatures can be so hot that all the rocks on this whole planet would be vaporized instantly, let alone organic material. Or it can be so cold that everything would be frozen solid at absolute zero. Maybe colder for all I know. In such a context, the temperature range in which a human being can stay alive is extremely narrow. But here today, not only were we in the appropriate window to be able to survive, it was precisely in the middle of that window where it's not just possible to be alive, but a great day to be alive. It was completely delightful outside. So even if you can't get your head around intelligent design as the source for living beings on this earth, how about the engineering required to provide a place for them to live? The precision of the placement, rotation speed, and axis angle is incredible. Any difference in any of those factors and life would probably not be possible. I thanked God for a beautiful day made just for us to be delighted by and thrive in.

Place Holder

No, I didn't die and no, I haven't given up blogging. I have some things I've been wanting to put up but I made a trip and was without a connection most of the time. Since getting back I've been working long days every single day - a very good problem! I have another four days of hard push before you will probably see anything new here.