Do you ... Erhu?

The erhu is a two-stringed traditional Chinese instrument. One of the top erhu players in the world is Yang Ying, who rose to musical prominence in her native China, then emigrated to the U.S. where she plays traditional tunes and original compositions that range from Mongolian folk tunes to jazz to funk to Led Zeppelin to Eric Clapton – and sometimes all mixed together. Ying played at the 2008 Planet Arlington World Music festival last September to wide acclaim.

But enough about Ying. That’s my son playing drums behind her on her original composition, Uninhibited. He’s a jazz studies major at the University of Illinois, working on his doctorate in music administration and does a fair job with Mongolian-Chinese-jazz-fusion in 11/8 time.

Winter is here

It's been a while since I built a video montage of photographs. (You can check out some of my past video efforts here.) Winter is a collection of my photographs of the season, both bleak and bright, expressive music by Steve Wick and a quote from artist Andrew Wyeth to mark the winter solstice.

Winter is a time of both endings and beginnings. Although the face of the earth appears barren, life continues to course just below the surface, waiting for the fullness of time to make its appearance again.

We've crossed the threshhold. We're now on our way to spring.

Video © 2008 James Jordan.

Cave Point

The Niagara Escarpment is a shelf of rock that stretches more than 650 miles across North America. Thousands of years ago, the Great Lakes, St. Lawrence Seaway, Niagara Falls and countless hills, valleys and waterways were carved out of the escarpment by glaciers.

Cave Point in the Door County peninsula of Wisconsin is one of my favorite places on earth. Shelves of limestone rock rise from the waters of Lake Michigan. The waters perform a dance with the rocks that has continued for centuries.

And yes, it seemed like an ideal place to build a balancing rock stack. Evidence of a visit by someone moved by the other-worliness of the place. Primeval forces continuing their drama for yet another Act in a show at once ancient and new.

I was here to watch for a while and participate.

Video © 2008 James Jordan. Music: Pilot Island, a composition by Steve Wick. More about Steve's music can be found at his web site.

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Try try again

It's not easy filling a birdhouse with twigs, especially if you're a bird of very little brain. Video of Mr. Wren trying to install a twig that just won't cooperate.

From my back door

Continuing with the theme of the view from my backyard is this time lapse video taken from the back door of my garage. I discovered that using the continuous shooting mode of my digital camera can record a time lapse series of photos. Using a freeware application to compile several hundred photos into a video results in the clip posted here. This was taken as a storm front moved through a couple of weekends ago.

So turn up the sound and watch the storm clouds roll. Those of you who subscribe via RSS feed will probably need to come to the blog to see the video.

Storm lapse

I took a number of shots last weekend as storm clouds rolled by my home (hoping to capture some lightning that never materialized). Scrolling through the shots on my digital camera, I was struck by the apparent motion of the clouds as the frames progressed.

I loaded the shots into a freeware time-lapse video creation application and created a short loop in Windows Movie Maker. I found a music clip in the Windows Media Player library, and by a happy accident, it matches the tempo of the scrolling photos.

The color of the clouds is from light pollution in the city in which I live. These photos were taken about 45 minutes after sunset.

Look for more (and better) time lapse stuff to come.

Things change

Ever see or hear something that shoots you back ten, twenty or even thirty years into the past? That happened to me this weekend, when I saw my wife playing with a toddler. Our kids are grown and in various stages of making a life for themselves. But seeing her make that little boy laugh out loud shot me back to the days when she did that for our oldest son. "Man, things sure change," I told myself.

Steve Wick captured that feeling for me in a musical composition entitled Things Change. I rounded up some photographs of the ever-changing face of the moon and combined them into a video slideshow.

The video is hosted on Flickr, which launched video uploading capabilities last week. My early tests have led me to conclude that the quality level of their video blows a couple of well-known video-hosting sites completely out of the water.

Give it a couple of seconds to buffer up, then let it rip. Enjoy.