Andreas Haugstrup Pedersen | solitude.dk

This is a lumiere video. The video contains no audio. Feel free to leave your own music running.

This is a lumiere video. The video contains no audio. Feel free to leave your own music running.

We have reached 700 lumiere videos and B celebrated with a very confused Ben Kingsley.

I'm taking photos on film again and it's a lot of fun, if a bit expensive. It began in February with an cheap fisheye camera and by now our collection is up to half a dozen cameras. My current favourite is a Beseler Topcon Unirex that I acquired used for a reasonable $70. It is a consumer SLR from the early 70s (production was stopped in 1973) and despite its age it is in a very good condition.

My father can confirm that I have been talking about SLRs for a long time, but there have been no way I could justify the cost of buying a digital SLR. A used film SLR is another matter and since the Topcon uses an extinct lens mount I will not be tempted to buy additional lenses. I am very pleased with the 50mm f/2 on this camera.

Learning how to use a mostly manual camera is an enjoyable experience. The underexposed and out-of-focus pictures has a certain charm to them and film grain looks good unlike the decidedly un-good look of digital film noise. B and I have setup a photoblog—quaint, I know—where we collect mostly photos shot on film and items from B's vast collection of old family photos.

My first camera was (of course) a film camera. I was 13 and I got it as a present from friends of the family. Fixed-focus, fixed focal length, fixed everything. I still have it is a closet somewhere. There are actually a couple of scans in an old blog entry from that camera. I never used it much because developing film is very expensive for the Danish teenager. Now that I am slightly more affluent (no doubt thanks to the dollar tanking) this is not a great concern. It also helps that the film cameras are either fun (fisheye) or more sophisticated (SLR) than my first.

I just added RSS to the Vlog Comment Generator and even exposed the API to the public. Now you can receive every comment generated via RSS or create mashups that incoporate the generated comments. I have no idea why you'd do such a thing, but my web 2.0 manual stated that these features are vital to the success of any website.

This is a lumiere video. The video contains no audio. Feel free to leave your own music running.

Someone who is not me invested in a polaroid camera despite the recent news that the polaroid company will cease to produce film (of course this also meant that the camera was extremely cheap). The process and the results are very exciting. The above video shows you the 4 minute development process in just under one minute. There's no audio.

You want to participate in the online conversation, join the discussion, and be a part of the community, but you haven't quit your full-time job to vlog and compress video all day. Between trying to provide for your family and keeping up with all of your Pownce/Twitter/Facebook friends, you have no time to write comments on videoblogs.

Over the weekend Brittany and I have been working hard to release our new tool for busy videobloggers. We are introducing the Vlog Comment Generator. This tool will automatically generate a comment for you to post on your favourite videoblog. You can generate comments from 4 different categories and even automatically add a 'thank you' and/or a smiley. We believe this lowers the barrier for entering the community.

This is a lumiere video. The video contains no audio. Feel free to leave your own music running.

This is a very long entry. Don't say I didn't warn you.

On both the videoblogging group and the Show in a Box (SIAB) working group the question of How do we best present video on the internet? has come up multiple times over the past 3-5 months. It is a vital question for the average videoblogger who wants to improve his or her site and especially for groups like Show in a Box which are trying to create software and designs that help present videos in their best light.

However, the discussions on those lists are mixing together three separate issues to answer the question of how to best present video on blogs. I will outline the three issues below and attempt to explain why it is important to solve these separately.