Milford Sound

If I had to pick only one word it would be magical. It was about a two hour drive up, mostly in the rain, and still around every bend it was like "oh look at that" and ""oh that's beautiful" and "oh wow." Not many pictures yet because of the rain, though we did pull over for the kia on the guy's car. It was practically like Galapagos: be sure to get my good side.

Te Anau

I used to carry a paper notebook and write in it each day to capture my memories of trips. And that was perfectly good and appropriate and normal. But somehow doing it electronically feels like I'm wasting my time on my laptop and I should be out doing stuff. So don't expect daily updates, but I'll probably write little bits as I go along and then post once for each location. Or maybe twice if my photos get too much.

Fall Break

We have a long weekend for fall break so I promised myself I would have one day where I did no work - no grading, no writing, no editing, no freelance. I have lived in Wisconsin for more than a year and have not really left Milwaukee. So yesterday I went for a leaf peak drive.

Poster child for Young of the Year

So I'm nearly finished with Young of the Year. My goal is to show it at the scientists' working group meeting at the start of November, which gives me 6 weeks to do all the color correction, stabilization, image clean up that needs to be done.

At the same time I need to get all the marketing materials ready. Right now I'm looking for the chick that can be the one I use for the web site, poster, business cards, etc. For those of you who are more graphically minded than I am, I'm running a poll.

Vote for your favorite chick.

Hiking the Adirondacks

Kate and I went up to her favorite waterfall and brook this week to wander around and take photos. We had a debate about whether it qualified as a hike or was just a walk. I pointed out that we had 100 photos of waterfalls as we walked, which means we have to be walking up. Otherwise it would just be a stream.

Why take the easy route when there are waterfalls to view?

There's also a bit of video on youtube.

And a bunch more photos:

A Week with the Terns

I'll start with the highlights and end with all the rest of the photos.

To give you a sense of the island:

They aren't kidding about don't land. Between Common Terns and Roseate Terns there are over 10,000 nests, which means 30-40 thousand birds, half of whom are tiny and under foot. You have to be so careful walking around.

That's a little blind on the left. There are maybe 10 of them scattered around the island. Then the big blind on the right which was the only one tall enough to fully stand in.

Sunset on the 4th of July.

If you do a google map search for Great Gull Island you can see it, but not at this time of year because most of the island is covered with vegetation like this and the map looks mostly dirt and open. 

Morning chick check. The commons like to hide under the brush.

Welcome Mom and Dad

It's been a lovely week so far with Mom and Dad. They arrived on Monday and mostly we just did house and neighborhood stuff.

Tuesday we went to the Milwaukee Art Museum which we all enjoyed. Then after we met up with Amanda and took her to dinner at a German restaurant overlooking the river in Wauwatosa. (Would have been a nice view if it weren't pouring down rain.)

Yesterday we decided to embrace being in Milwaukee and toured a local brewery. That was fun even though I don't really like beer.

Today in the morning I gave them a tour of campus. We had lunch at the Ale House on the river in the Third Ward. And it was beautiful weather so we sat outside. Then we went to The Domes. What are the Domes? You ask. There are three of them, a desert one, a tropical one, and a changing exhibits one. If all you want is verification that Mom and Dad are doing well, here you go:

If you would like more pictures of flowers then continue on.

Celebrating the return of Spring

Christa and Jason came up for the weekend and since Saturday was lovely weather we went out for a nature walk. It was slightly muddy for the shoes Christa was wearing, but she was definitely the cutest person on the trail.

We went to Lion's Den Gorge Nature Preserve at the suggestion of my friend Joe (the documentary filmmaker at work).

Here's some photos:

Working on Young of the Year

I've been making good progress, though the rough cut is still a bit too rough to let anyone look. But I spent Spring Break down in DC and did a sit down interview with Jeff, so now I'm getting closer to what the film should be. I am very motivated, in the current climate of 30% reductions to the EPA and limiting the endangered species list to do this film and do it well.

In the meantime I'm spending this weekend working on a trailer. Because I had a research assistant for the academic year, I am required to participate in Scholarship Day at the College. I would want to anyway really. The best path to tenure is getting people invested in what I'm doing as my creative scholarship so they need to actually see it. Anyway, everyone else on the faculty is making a poster of their research. I pointed out that a poster doesn't really work for me and could I maybe do a trailer instead. They said sure, so here I am working on it.

I sent a handful of people links to unlisted videos on YouTube. If you were not on the list and would like to be let me know. If you are one of them, please vote at the right for your favorite. And if you don't think any of them work that's ok too, just leave me a comment below. I think Scholarship Day is the 20th or so, so I have a few weeks to get this right. The only real difference between the three is the music. My voice over is the same, and the clips are all the same, just fewer of them for the shorter music selections. They are pretty decent rough cuts, but I'll take the winning one and do some fine tuning of the edits, smooth out a couple of the rougher moves, and clean up some speck on the lens moments. (But that kind of stuff is a pain so I only want to do it for the clips I know I'm using.)