Gimbal

I got a gimbal in today.  I can't tell you how excited I am about this because it is going to enable me to do the kinds of amazing camera things you see in videos made by professionals.   I am so much of an amateur photographer and videographer that I am just beyond the turning the camera on and pushing the button stage.   Perhaps that's an exaggeration, but taking quality videos is very complex.  It is so much more complicated than I would have thought it could be. 

With a quality camera, certainly taking good videos would be easy, right?  As it turns out, that's not so at all.  You have to know how to set up the shot and most importantly, what settings you need to have for the camera in order to get the best image or video possible for the setup.   It's fiendishly complicated and it is not made any simpler by a fancy camera.  That only adds to the number of options you have to choose from. 

This is something my husband has excelled at learning since we started taking photographs and videos of the 3D printing.   One thing we've had difficulty doing is getting stable shots of things or shots that pan across the models in a smooth way.   This gimbal will give us a lot of digital control over how we move the camera and will move it not only smoothly while we clumsily move around, it will make the motions for us while we have the gimbal staying still.  

And this is a good thing.  Except it is another product with its own set of software we'll need to learn to integrate into the already complicated camera itself.   I have a feeling I'm going to be looking at a lot of YouTube videos to learn it in the coming weeks. 

The Big Boy Update:  My son counted up all his bills he'd been saving and rolled them up to store into a combination codex he created from one of the KiwiCo kits we got in the mail recently.   He had "fifteen" cents in the total of bills when he was proudly telling me about it.   The fifteen cents was some foreign money he'd been given that apparently has an exchange rate of about fifteen cents he'd asked Alexa about. 

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter has been wearing something that will help her wake up in the middle of the night when she needs to go to the bathroom.   She will sleep through it sometimes and wake up as she's starting to wet the bed, resulting in panic on her part.   I don't blame her, I'd panic too.  She needed an extra boost to help her wake up and this little device has helped train her brain to wake up more.   Hopefully, she won't need it soon enough.