Every Year, Utah State University and various members of the community put on a performance of Handel’s Messiah. For the last 4 years, I have filmed it. As such, I attended the dress rehearsal last night. It is always an awesome performance, and each year it seems to get better.
Basically its volunteer soloists, choir, and orchestra - conducted by a talented musician/instructor of Audiology. Some of the songs are sung in Spanish, and all are translated into American Sign Language (ASL). The Sign Language is presented as a theatrical interpretation (as opposed to a word for word transliteration) of the performance. Proceeds from ticket and DVD sales, in addition to various sponsor donations, go to fund an Audiological mission to Mexico, in which students from Utah State travel to Mexico to test hearing and fit people with hearing aides as needed.
This year, the performance will be at the Ellen Eccles Theater. In addition to the typical evening performances they are trying something new this year - A Saturday afternoon matinee specifically geared toward children and families. It will be more educational - information about Handel & his music, as well as concert etiquette, etc… The dialog will be presented in English, Spanish and ASL.
In any case, its a great experience and I highly recommend attending if you can.
The dates are March 28th & 29th, 2008 and ticket prices range from $5 to $10 depending on seating location. Or $10 for a family of 5 (matinee only, and children must be 5 years or older). You can get tickets here, or at the Ellen Eccles Theater Box Office: (435) 752-0026. (Note: I wasn’t able to find how to get the family discount via online ordering)
Here are a few images from yesterday’s rehearsal - and a video clip from last year’s performance.
We are down to the final days for online ordering of images from the 2007 Logan High baseball season.
All of the galleries will expire this Monday, Labor Day.
So, if you are planning to order, please do so soon! I also have a handful of collages from the closing banquet dinner. If you are a parent of one of these players, and want a copy, please drop me an e-mail.
Here are a few examples of what is available:
There are copies in the above styles for several other players as well.
For those of you curious about the status of the Messiah DVD, please read the following:
Due to circumstances beyond my control, involving delayed payment from the University for the discs, they will not ship until Tuesday June 19th. My apologies to those of you who got your money to John Ribera or Freeman King on time.
Please let me know if there are any questions. Thanks.
By now I’m certain you’ve all given up on my ability to blog. It has been awhile, 2 whole weeks actually. But let me tell you that having a day job (other than photography) can keep a person pretty busy - particularly when approaching the deadline of a huge project. Such was the case with me the last couple of weeks. I work at WestHost, and we’ve been actively involved in launching a huge upgrade to our hosting platform. Everything went live on Monday, so we should be back to relatively normal life now.
In any case. My sweet husband, David Ernstrom, is graduating from Utah State University in a couple of weeks. So we took a little trip up to campus a few days ago and took some portraits of him all dressed up in his cap and gown. He was a little embarrassed at first to be parading around campus in his graduation getup a couple of weeks before he actually graduates, but after a few minutes it wasn’t a bit deal anymore. We compared it to a girl in a wedding dress having her bridals done. Yes, its a bit awkward at first, and you stick out like a sore thumb - but once you start to get into it and get lost in the moment, its fine, its fun, and its seemingly completely natural. We shot mostly for graduation announcements, and just for the memories - after all its not everyday you graduate. Dave will be getting two degrees: One in Computer Science, and the other in Computer Engineering (Thus the two tassels).
This first one is my favorite. Isn’t he hot?
It took a little bit of begging to get him to do this next one. But I think it turned out fun.
His graduation announcements are in the mail from my lab. So once we get them they will be sent out. Commencement ceremonies will take place on Saturday May 5th.
Congratulations to Dave and all the other graduating seniors out there!!
I couldn’t resist posting another video clip from the Messiah.
This is THE SONG that gets stuck in my head the absolute most when I edit footage from the Multicultural Messiah each year, so I have to share. It wouldn’t be fair for me to be the only one with this song stuck in my head.
This time you only get one option for size: Large Video - High Speed Connections
And just for good measure, and since I didn’t give you a small version of the video as an option, and just so I can make certain that this song gets stuck in your head too. . .
You can download a copy of the MP3 for this song here.
Copy it to your iPod’s, burn it to a CD and listen in your cars, put it on repeat
Or, if you prefer you can just come back and watch the video over and over and over again.
*If your browser just starts playing the MP3, instead of downloading it, try going to ‘File’ and choosing ‘Save page as’*
(For those of you singing in the chorus - yes, this really is you singing. It is the audio from the live performance - and you really do sound that good, or better!)
That’s It for Now.
Maybe I’ll post a clip or two from the ASL version in a couple of weeks. If you feel the need to suggest a preview of a specific song, please feel free to leave your suggestions in the comments for this post. Maybe you’ll get lucky.
NOTE: If you haven’t purchased a DVD, but you want one, get ahold of John Ribera.
(If you want the ASL version, let him know)
Enjoy! And add a comment, let me know what you think!
****EDIT****
I just found this link to an article on the Messiah on USU’s website. Check it out!
And here is another one!
Also, comments have been made about the audio mix - The soloists kind of get drowned out by the orchestra/chorus. I am sorry. Despite (what I thought was) communication with people at the theater, they weren’t prepared to do a recording for me. The mix was for the house, and the soloists weren’t mic-d for a recording. We’ve used on camera audio for the DVD’s for the past several years - complete with coughing, laughter, and other strange bodily noises produced by the audience. So, this recording is a step up. It is much better than than the on camera - except in the case mentioned above.
I am hoping to work with John next year to do a recording session, so things aren’t taped live, and we can get everyone on the same page for every aspect of the final product. I do hope you enjoy it regardless. I very much appreciate those at Peery’s Egyptian Theater who worked to get this audio recorded.
If you don’t have one, you need one. I promise, you do.
We bought an AppleTV last month when they came out and I absolutely love the thing.
If you don’t know what it is I’m talking about, read this, and check out this picture from Apple’s website:
Ok, now that you know what it is, let me tell you why I love it, and why you need it.
We have lots of DVD’s, my husband and I, and we would regularly have to play rock-paper-scissors to see who had to be the one to get up and insert or switch discs when we wanted to watch a show. Juvenile, I know. But now we don’t have to. Instead we’ve been actively converting all of our DVD’s, videos, etc. . . to MPEG-4 and streaming them from our iTunes to the AppleTV. Its really quite cool. Besides, now we don’t have stacks of discs with missing cases sitting stacked on top of out DVD player, or discs being put in the wrong case, etc, etc. We also stream all of our music from iTunes to the AppleTV - which means we can listen to it downstairs without blaring it full volume from our computer speakers upstairs. The day of the CD is coming to an end my friends (wink, wink).
Oh, and from a photography standpoint, if you sync from your computer (instead of stream) you can also view your photos on the AppleTV. Eventually, I want to be able to use this technology to show my clients the images from their sittings on a projection screen (of course, I have to get a screen and a projector first). Wouldn’t that be cool.
Now obviously there are some features I’d like to see added, but hey it is a first generation product. So, Apple, Steve Jobs, if you happen to come across this post, I have a few suggestions for your next revision/firmware update:
Party Shuffle - this is something I love about iTunes, but its missing from my AppleTV
Streaming pictures - why do I have to sync them anyway?
A menu structue for Movies like you have for TV shows, so I can group movies together (e.g. Star Wars)
Lastly, I’d like to be able to scroll through the menus/items in a continuous loop (so if I scroll up from the top, I’d go to the bottom entry, and likewise if I’m at the end of the list and press ‘down’ that I’ll end up back at the top)
So, there you have it.
If you are not yet convinved that you need one, go visit one of the Apple Stores (or ExperCom, here in Logan) and ask to see an example. I bet they’ve got one setup.
I decided to play with a little technique called “Out of Bounds” where you make an image look like its jumping out of the frame in which it was intended to be in.
The image I used was from Logan High School’s game against Clearfield last Wednesday. In this shot Logan’s #25 slid into third base just as the ball rolled past Clearfield’s third baseman. They both have great expressions on their faces too.
Last weekend I filmed Utah State University’s production of Handel’s Messiah. This was my fourth year doing the performance, I have to say that this performance was one of the best I’ve seen.
For those of you who missed it, you really missed out! There was a lot of feeling and energy in this year’s performance and everyone had a great time.
I have just finished importing all of the camera video and the audio from the mini discs. The footage looks good, but next comes the creative part of putting it all together to make the DVD. I’ll post some video examples of a couple of songs later this week. And for those of you that have ordered copies of the DVD, expect them to ship by the first weekend in June. In the meantime, here are a few images from the evening:
If any of the performers or organizers from this performance of The Messiah are reading this, bravo. You did a wonderful job bringing to life Handel’s beautiful work!
Awhile back one of my favorite lenses had a run in with the pavement and had to be sent in for repair. It was a sad day, because I really, really love this lens.
Anyway, I got it back not too long ago, and took a few practice shots just to make sure everything was working. And because I missed my lens - and I really love it (did I mention that?). These shots are just a couple images of my daughters toys
The images just have such great color, they are so crisp, and they have an amazing depth of field.
In case you are wondering, this amazing lens is Canon’s 50mm f/1.4. In the second image, the book was only about 8 inches from the toys in the background. The ability to blur the background like that makes this one of my favorite lenses for portraits.
