Video: All Landings at San Diego Int Airport Friday Nov 23 from 1030am to 300pm

Darn, I can't find the link at the moment - but months ago I saw an amazing photo on the Petapixel blog in which a photographer shot every plane that landed at ?Airport? in a day then composited all the planes into one image. Which made me wonder if it could be done with video? It turns out that it definitely can be done but is easiest with a pure blue sky and with the camera facing up not toward the horizon. With an even blue background it's fairly easy to key out each airplane and put them together. The bridge in this shot is an added time lapse under the 1st Street bridge in San Diego.

I was really surprised by two things: the number of planes that landed in 4 hours (close to 70) and the dominance of Southwest Air.

 

New Media Rights Fund Raiser

A heads up to the creative community. New Media Rights is raising funds to continue their remarkable mission:

"New Media Rights provides free and drastically reduced-fee legal services to independent creators like game developers, independent filmmakers, startups and consumers. For creators with financial need and innovative projects, we provide the same assistance that hiring a $300-$500 an hour lawyer would provide, but we do it for free, and we’ve been doing it for free since 2007. Recently, we’ve become an independent project of California Western School of Law: home of the California Innocence Project and other groups. Since we’re an independent project, we continue to rely on grants and individual donations to fund our work."

http://www.indiegogo.com/newmediarightsgames

(IN)VISIBLE PROJECT at University of San Diego

There’s a great photo project that’s on display at USD right now. The (IN)VISIBLE PROJECT is a self-contained gallery space for a photo project shot by Bear Guerra. It combines beautiful black+white portraits of local homeless people with audio recordings of the subjects telling their stories.

This kind of thing done poorly would be a one-note bummerfest/exploitation but Bear’s take weaves a diverse set of stories together in a way that’s illuminating and like any good art - provokes recognition. In my case - a recognition that the homeless population is extremely diverse in itself as are the causes of homelessness. Like many people, my interactions with homeless people are limited to fleeting moments of uncomfortable eye contact at intersections and little more. The show was a nice opportunity for me to think a little deeper.

I helped Bear set the show up last Sunday. Toward the end of the day I found my inner voice chattering non-stop about homelessness – something I’m personally very afraid of. So much of it seems to be just bad luck. One man in the exhibit, a ship worker, tells his story – he was transferred to SD by his company then laid off six months later without enough money to get home. He didn’t have family that could help him. It took so little?

I’ve had the idea for a while now that life is much more like Plinko than I would like to admit and listening to these stories partly confirmed that. The randomness, the unexpected intervention of bad luck into these people’s lives is frightening. If the world really is that random, and I believe it is – then we need a great deal of help from one another. And that unfortunately is an idea we individualistic Americans are not well invested in.

On the surface the (IN)VISIBLE PROJECT is a meditation of one city’s homeless population but beneath that I think it’s also a look at the downside of a core American value – that we are individuals responsible only for ourselves. The up side is that we’re allowed to claim all of our successes as self manifested – but if we fail, we fail alone. There are reams of American artists who’ve studied the loneliness implicit in these values but Edward Hopper comes to my mind first (you could argue that his figurative paintings are not studies of people but the spaces between people). If you’ve never been alone or lonely then you’ve never been American.

Check out the show, it’s free and will be up for another week.

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