A Picture's Worth A Thousand Words... What About Video?

 It's really kind of funny the round about routes we take to get us to our current situations. Eight years ago, I bought my first digital camera, and instantly the love affair was on with digital imagery. As with most first timers, I found myself taking pictures of everything and anything, filling the memory card in just a few days, loath to delete even the most banal subjects. But necessity is the mother of invention, or in my case at that time, the mother of further financial expenditure. I'd had the camera for 4 months before the purchase of my first computer.

  With the computer came a whole new set of possibilities. I was given Adobe Photoshop and Premier (a movie making program) which severely tested my limited user skills and patience. Unlike Homer Simpson's "If you tried and failed, it probably wasn't worth doing", I could see the potential for boring the shit out of my friends in completely new ways that our parents never dreamed of...a slide show with attitude. So I kept plugging on, honing my skills, and occasionally "borrowing" special effects like 3D Pan.

 Interesting enough, I've only been connected to the internet for the past 6 months (primarily for job search purposes), and only recently started blogging and uploading to You Tube. The latter two on the suggestion of my friend David Hunter of The Writers Den, as a way to inflict upon the whole world my personal skewed view of the way things stand. Anyways... that's how I find myself here writing this posting now.

 One of my biggest problems to date has been distribution of my "artistic creations". It has become ritual at the end of each year to take all the pics and vids from my fishing trips and edit them into a video slideshow, to be given out to anyone that took part in the yearly adventures. As my list of fishing companions has grown, so has the amount of time necessary to burn copies onto DVD. The actual editing and rendering of the video is still a pleasure, but I find the burn process incredibly tiresome, especially when I see my hard work casually thrown onto a pile of other un-watched discs, only to be forgotten. So, from now on, unless I get a special request for a hard copy, all videos will go directly to You Tube and this blog.

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4 Season Fishing

  2009 was an outstanding year for fishing and travel. The compilation of the movies for the year was challenging not only because of the large number trips and images, but also because of my own personal need to keep it fresh and interesting.

 The new year started off slow, with just a few scattered trips out on the ice with a newbie to ice fishing : Sarcastic (not his real name, just his predominant attribute).

 

 The fishing in the spring picked up, with a few trips to local rivers, reservoirs and ponds earlier on. On one early local outing I met the Russian, and a month later I introduced him to some of my favorite cottage country locations. At the same time, his sense of fishing adventure and my "backroad" experience, led to the discovery of many new fishing opportunities and a few long forgotten locations. Not all trips produced memorable catches, but the videos capture the wonder of Ontario.

 

 Summer provided a few new areas to explore, but the majority of the time was spent fishing within the Toronto city limits. Notable trips included our first to the Niagara area, and two long awaited returns to the Port Severn area with Treefrog, Sarcastic and the Russian.

 

 The fall was busy, starting out with a trip to a small lake north of Barrie, followed by several months of salmon fishing in the local rivers. The year wound down with a few trips to Barrie for perch fishing before the freeze, and ending with a surprise ice fishing trip to a local lake.

 

 After seeing all this, I hope you will agree that 2009 was a great year, and I enjoyed boring the shit out of you with my inane ramblings and self indulgent video sideshows. My biggest problem right now with You Tube is that some of the audio tracks have been dis-allowed for copyright infringements and I've had to substitute them with the crap they supply. Another problem is one video has been denied upload due to it's length. So... to view these altered or denied videos in their original, although lower resolution formats, just click on: picasaweb.google.com/Movies
 View my You Tube channel at: thedeadfisher