Arise, Oh Lord (Psalm 3)

Arise, oh Lord, and rescue me
From you alone comes victory
You alone conquer enemies
Arise, oh Lord
and rescue me

I'm fast asleep without a sound
Though my enemies surround
Oh, how soundly is my sleep
When the night watch, the Lord keeps

And you answer
Yes, you answer when I call on you

My foes are many, they rise against
And cause my friends to doubt me when
I claim that you will rescue me
I know you my shield and my strength to be

I know you my shield and my strength to be
You hold my head high, you are my glory

Original by David

Demo of Ever Green

Here's the demo version of Ever Green!  Enjoy!

Psalm 2

They plot and they scheme, the nations and kings
The rulers on earth stand together
They scheme and they plot, but wise are they not
To, "throw off their chains and their fetters"

And you just laugh at them
You scoff and laugh at them

Your king sits on the throne
And we fall to our knees and we shake as we praise him
The world is his to own
And the nations are his to rule as he pleases

Be warned and be wise, his anger will rise
Who spit in his face when they refuse
Be wise and be warned, you rulers on earth
What joy for who in him take refuge

check out the original here

Ever Green (Psalm 1)

I'll admit it, I'm not a great vocalist.  Yet somehow, I've managed to find myself leading worship.  Now, I can sing melodies which I write well enough, but having to sing someone else's melody is a different story.  There are a lot of great worship songs that are ripe with the Gospel--songs I love, but are too difficult for me to sing.  So I've decided to write my own hymnal.  Over the course of the next 150 weeks (give or take), I'm going to write a song based on each Psalm.  Here is Psalm 1...

Ever Green

Their roots run deep

day and night, from your river of life, they drink

the truth which comes from your lips

and your word is all they need

to keep their leaves ever green

but not the wicked

no, not the wicked

They are as chaff in the wind

Rejects with no home

They have no mass, no foundation

They are next to dust

but not the righteous

no, not the righteous

They are planted in your word

and it ever bears fruit

Not only are they prosperous

but see the strength of their roots!

No force can break, no arm can bend

those who take root in your garden

those who walk the path you defend

Electroacoustic Interpretation of "Non-Commercial Music"

This is a piece I recently recorded for my Electronic Music class.  Our assignment was to manipulate recorded audio and compose a piece that was "non-commercial".  Not knowing entirely what that meant, I strived to stray away from most conventional musical properties.  I apologize in advance for any melody, timing, beat, rhythm, etc. that you may hear in this piece.  I tried my hardest not to include it.

Warming The Seats

Warming The Seats from Josh Campbell on Vimeo.

This was my first attempt at cutting together video footage and recreating a narrative. The story was inspired by a dream I had...

As you'll see, we shot at night and needed to use a high ISO. As a result, our images had quite a bit of noise. Additionally, we didn't adjust white balance for every scene. Black and white was the easiest option.

Being a sound guy, I spent much more time on sound than video in post production. Besides, most of the video work was done during production. The audio from the outdoor scenes were mostly deleted due to wind noise. The remaining audio from the video files were edited into place, then exported into a digital audio workstation. I EQ'd out most of the bottom end to remove competition with the music. I compressed this audio, as well, to even things out. My only regret is that I wish I had taken the time to re-record Greg saying, “I was just warming the seats.”

The rest of my day was spent recording the music.

I'd like to be commissioned to do the soundtrack for the apocalypse. Any offers?

End of the World: Track 1

This is the music from a video I'm featuring this week called “Warming the Seats”. I tried writing this song a little differently.

I call it the vomit technique. Some may call it steam of conscious. Some may call it learning from mistakes. Some may call it think-tanking or brainstorming. Just put it all out there, throw it all up, put all your raw materials on the table. No matter how terrible, how putrid, how vile it may be, get it out there. I find when I sit down to write or compose and I don't produce more than I really need, then I don't say all I want to say and the product turns out inferior. Though it may start out clumsy and inarticulate, once you vomit all your creativity out you can sculpt it into something refined. My sketchbook is full of stream of consciousness writing just waiting to be sculpted with meter and rhyme into a verse and a song.

For this piece I wrote one foundation part, bass and percussion, then added as many other parts as I could think of and that would be appropriate—two acoustic guitars, three electric, two keyboards, and a synth. Then I edited and mixed to taste. In essence, a recipe for the sounds of the end of the world.

Remembering September 11

It's strange that people will approach and talk to you because you're shooting an event or holding a strange camera. I recently shot an even in downtown Springfield, MO and brought my medium format film camera. I talked to a lot of strangers simply because I was shooting with an “antique”.

Meeting people this way was true while shooting video of the September 11 ceremonies that took place at Missouri State University earlier this Fall. I was on assignment for the Standard and had my gear set up, waiting for the action to begin. A few folks stopped to ask what I was doing and who I was doing it for. This started the conversation and led to the interviews you hear in the video. A veteran initially approached me to talk about camera gear. It didn't take long for the conversation to turn toward the event and the gentleman explained to me the importance of hearing taps and what September 11 meant to him.

It's easier to become attached to the story when you talk to people who are passionate about the issue. This assignment was a great way for me to remember September 11, in a way I probably wouldn't have had I not been shooting the events.

I thoroughly enjoy experiencing events like this in our city. While shooting for the newspaper, I've attended events I never would have before. Because of this, I've gained a greater appreciation of where I'm from.

This was perhaps my third or fourth attempt at editing video. I think very much like a photographer—I rely only on real simple transitions and let the framing of the video speak for itself (it's also true that I haven't explored fancy transitions and animations yet...). I went out of my way to process and treat the audio—this is especially important to me.

While audio and video are obviously very distinct, there's a certain cohesiveness or homogeneity that needs to happen in a film. I haven't gotten to the point where I see films as the unique combination of audio and video—I see it more as audio with a video component.

The most difficult part of the his process is taking footage from an event and cutting it together into a narrative. I constantly asked myself, “would this make sense if I hadn't been there?” The text helps clue the viewer in on the story in a subtle way. However, I'm not sure the narrative for this video is very strong overall. It's another complexity I'm still learning about.

Even Though...

I used what I call the “vomit” technique to write the parts for this song. I had been toying around with the opening guitar line days before recording the song and built everything from there. I wrote this as if it could be a theme in a film, moving, in and out, different arrangements on the same chord progression.

At the time, I was interested in writing music correlating to scripture. I asked Todd Wallace for his opinion on an appropriate scripture. He told me he struggled to find the right one, the song was so light hearted and the Bible deals mostly with heavy and ultimate issues. He settled on Habakkuk3:16-19, parts of which is spoken in the last bars of the song.   

Macro Extension Tube

I tried to remedy the depth of field problem the best I could. For one, I did not shoot with the 50mm f/1.8 portrait lens. I shot with the 18-135mm zoom lens at its longest focal length, ensuring that the widest aperture was f/5.6 (instead of f/3.5). This was the smallest aperture I could get with the equipment I had. Still, the photos had a pretty shallow depth of field.  

As you can see from the photo above, the grass was still green with I shot these photos.  It wasn't until this fall that I learned that f-stops are constant only in exposure and not it terms of depth of field.  What I mean is this:  if you meter a scene and it reads an exposure of 1/30s at f/5.6, no matter what camera or what lens you use, your exposure will be the same.  But depth of field at f/5.6 might not be same from lens to lens.  The reason that cheap zoom lenses have a variable maximum aperture, like f/3.5-5.6, is because the meter has to compensate for the changing distance between the lens and the sensor or negative.  As you zoom further out, the distance becomes greater and less light can reach its destination.  So, when your zoom lens is fully extended and you're shooting at f/5.6 instead of f/3.5, your aperture is not closing down, indeed it is actually the same.  It is merely compensating for the difference in light.  Your depth of field will remain the same.

All in all, I suppose the depth of field gives the photos a unique flavor.

And heck, for 10 bucks its worth toying around with.

You can check out the rest of the macro tube photos here.

Macro Extension Tube

Macro photography can be a lot of fun, but lenses are quite a large investment for such a specific genre. No fear, macro extension tubes can convert any lens into macro lens for a fraction of the cost!

Extension tubes work by putting additional space between your lens and the sensor or negative. However, depending on the focus range of the lens, you may not be able to focus to infinity or anywhere near it—you will only be able to focus within a few inches of your subject. But that's the ok, 'cause you're doing macro photography.

Also, be warned that the cheapest extension tubes (which I purchased) cannot communicate electronically between the lens and the camera body. I thought this would be ok when I bought the tube, figuring on trial and error to come up with the proper exposure. I neglected to take into account that I would not be able to control aperture—meaning every shot will be taken at its widest aperture. At such a close distance you're going to have only smallest sliver of focus to work with.

Stop Motion and Time Lapse: The Beginnings

Here is a collection of my first stop motion and time lapses, in order of creation.

Downtown Springfield: A Time Lapse

Today's time lapse was taken during the same shoot as the first. I wanted to something a little different for the audio—an original recording time synced to events that take place in the video.

Downtown Springfield: A Time Lapse

I previewed a process a few weeks back that I call Panoramic Narrative. With it, I'm exploring the telling of narrative through the use of multiple frames, a step past single shot photography. Stop motion and time lapse videos a step beyond even multiple frame narratives and marks my transition from photo to video.

I began making these videos out of necessity—my team was assigned the task to shoot an accompanying video for an audio project in our production class. It was during this time that I began to strongly desire to shoot video, but had no capacity to do so. I had become interested in stop motion, a process I could do with the equipment I had available. Having no other options for class, we decided to shoot stop motion, one of my very first attempts.

The time lapses I'm showcasing today and tomorrow represent the most serious and best produced of the time lapses that I've made.

Here's the process for today's time lapse: I mounted my camera on a tripod and set it in the front passenger seat. With the help of some colleagues and a remote shutter release, I was able to capture the short ride around downtown Springfield, MO in several hundred photos.

I used iMovie to render the video. First, I had to import the photos into iPhoto, there's no other way to get them into iMovie. Before importing them into iMovie, I had to adjust the Initial Photo Placement. Had I skipped this step, I would have had to manually change the placement for each frame, adding hours of unnecessary work.

How to get there: File—Project Properties—Timing. Change Initial Photo Placement to either crop of fit to screen.

Now I could drag my photos into the project (click the camera icon half way up the page and on the right). Once they were in, I selected them all and right clicked to change the duration of each still. In iMovie, the shortest duration is .1 second or 10 frames per second. For whatever reason, iMovie doesn't actually play the still back at that rate. It's closer to 7 or 8 frames per second.

I slapped on some text, transitions, and audio and called it a wrap.

Star Trail 10/24/11

Star Trail 10/24/11, a photo by TheLouisianaJackhammer on Flickr.

It must have been fate that I chose to walk this night. What else could explain it? Divinity had His hand in it--the night sky glowed faintly red but for a few short minutes. I would have missed it if I had embarked at any other time.

I didn't catch the Northern Lights in this particular image, but it was a strange sight to see. I shot this star trail on a whim early last week. It turned out well and yielded one of the best time lapses I've attempted yet.



Instead of using the Star Trails application, I used an action for Photoshop. Star Trails is a windows only program. Also, the software hasn't been updated in years and I'm worried it might become obsolete.  For the time lapse, I imported the images to Premiere and set the length of each still to 1 frame (instead of the default 150) in a video set to 30 frames per second.  So, every still being a 30 second exposure, each second in the time lapse is actually 15 minutes in real time