So, just been playing around with some multimedia software. Long time since I really did any professional multimedia productions, so thought I’d brush up on it again, see what’s possible, with formats, bandwidth, the 5D2 camera etc.

According to the industry prophets, multimedia is supposed to be the big and bright future of photojournalism. True, it’s one of the ‘new’ possibilities of web publishing. Although we’ll probably need some more super broadband connections before it really replaces text+stills. Actually, I hope it never does replace text and stills! But put it all together in a package, leave options to users how they want to have it, then sell it through subscription, micro-payments and affiliate programs, with ads on the side. And able to run on iPhones and BlackBerries. Yep, I can see that being the future. Not too distant, in fact. Can’t wait!

But aside from this little look into the crystal bowl, I also just wanted to share some private pictures of Julie, our daughter.

She’s beginning to make a lot of funny sounds, laughing etc. So I recorded that. Not without difficulty. Every time I put the microphone close to her, she just stopped speaking and starred at it! And when I finally did manage to get a bit of audio, an airplane passed overhead, making it onto the soundtrack. Well ok, it’s just for fun today.

As an experiment, I made it as a movie file so I can play it from YouTube. Just to get some free bandwidth and see how it works out. Had to compress it a bit to get some speed, so the still photos are slightly soft. But again, just playing around today…

Enough tech talk, here’s the slideshow. Just hit the play button:

Also made a video production. The footage is about two month old, but just put it together a couple of days ago. Enjoy:

Next step I guess is making stills, video footage, ambient audio, narration, theme music, hypertext etc, all in one production. Bring it on!

And now that we’ve got all the baby photos on the blog, I’m happy to say that Julie now has both her passport (Danish) and visa (Nepalese). It took a couple of months all together, with the wonderful bureaucracy. I’ve gotten used to it by now, but to outsiders wondering how it can take two months, here’s some extracts from the conversations I / we have had at various government offices:

- Hello, I would like a visa for my daughter. Here’s her passport!
- Where’s her entry visa?
- She doesn’t have one. She was born here.
- But she needs an entry visa…
- But she never entered the country!
- Hmmm… ok…. Now where’s your relationship certificate?
- Here’s our marriage certificate.
- No, no. Relationship certificate!
- Isn’t marriage a sort of relationship?
- No. I want to see your daughters relationship to her mother.
- Aah, birth certificate! Here it is, the hospital one, the government one (which took a whole day to get) and the official translation of it (which took another whole day to get).
- It’s no good! I need one from your ward office…

And so it continued. The ward office wouldn’t issue the relationship certificate, even thought we had all the necessary documents. The guy went (to my wife):

- Yes, I can see you are a Nepalese citizen. But maybe you also have an illegal Danish citizenship?
- No I don’t!
- How do I know that?

We note how nicely he has just applied the legal principle of being guilty until proven otherwise… No. Not going down that road… So through some gentle nepotism we got his boss to call him and tell him to do his f…ing job. Had to go through a couple of other offices as well before we could go back to the visa office… Where we now had to pay a penalty for being late!

And this is not even half of it. But oh well, in the end we got the documents we needed. But what a super way of wasting everyone’s time!

Hope you enjoy the photos though!