No-Sleep Photography

First of all, I apologize for the long drought of updates. I have been surviving my first semester at Washington and Lee University up in the beautiful mountains of Virginia. In between Calculus, Chinese I, and Political Philosophy, I have had little enough time to breathe, much less post regularly on my blog.

That brings me to the topic of my current post. The Lord recently provided an awesome new camera, a Canon SX10 IS, through a special technology scholarship at my school. I've since been enjoying shooting photos of our campus, reputed to be among the prettiest in the United States.

Last Sunday night I was busy on a Music History paper due the next morning at 9 and was up most of the night--in fact, I had only 1.5 hours of sleep when I walked into class that morning. The upside to this really long night was that I got to see a spectacular sunrise the next morning at a quarter to seven--the photos below were just taken off my dorm steps twenty feet from my room.


R.E. Lee Episcopal silhouetted against the sunrise.

A little wider shot with the Lee House and Davis Hall in the picture, taken across the BDG Quad.

I'm home for the moment for Thanksgiving and greatly enjoying finally getting enough sleep, despite having a major political philosophy paper to write over break. Sleep, politics paper, food and more sleep cover most of my priorities for this week. And then back to school for one more week of class, then finals and Christmas break! Lord willing I should be able to post some more pictures soon, especially over the Christmas holidays. And now to bed, for it is plenty late already...

Incipient Laptop-itis and Calvinism: A Comforting Combination

I am sitting here in the final throes of incipient laptop-itis. The Lord has provided the funds through my work this summer to purchase a new laptop to replace my ailing one. I found a really nice system on eBay (details later) and have my bid in to win it. With 5 minutes to go. With nobody else bidding atm. With me about to fidget to death sitting in front of my brother's desktop, my dead current laptop on the desk. 1 minute 35 seconds to go...

It is at times like these that I am glad to be a Calvinist--it is so comforting. Most people don't understand this--they think that to believe that the Lord knows and controls the future means that they are chained to fate. It's not that way. From our side, we see our free will. From the Lord's, though, outside of time and space, he can see and touch our futures in a way we can only imagine. So it's comforting. He knows and cares whether or not I win the item I want. It's nice to think sometimes in the uncertainty that the choice or outcome we worry about is a known fact in the future--and God knows. It is comforting to have a full view of God's sovereignty in a situation like this--like when you get outbid at 24 seconds to go.

Game over. You didn't win. But the Lord knows, and he may also know if that computer was a lemon, the seller would cheat you, or just that you ought to buy something else. It's far from being restricting--it's freeing to know that the King of all Kings, the Creator of Time and Space, the Owner of the cattle on a thousand hills, has my well-being in mind--I don't have to worry.

In His Service,
John Calvin Young

R3 Script for Hitler's Law

First, I'd like to apologize for the script confusion. I submitted the last post thinking I had a copy of the script on another server and I could move it over easily. (My laptop has been down for a few days and I couldn't get to the original file.) I finally realized that the only copy of the R3 script was on my laptop hard drive and I couldn't immediately get to it, so I reposted the link to the r1 script (by now superseded.)

Today I connected my laptop hard drive to another computer with an adapter and was able to upload the current R3 version of the script. Enjoy!

http://www.youngchristianstudios.com/hitlerslaw_r3.pdf

In His Service,
John Calvin Young

Drum Roll Please... Announcing "Hitler's Law"!

The Announcement



At long last, it is time to announce our latest project--"Hitler's Law"! It will be a 7-minute "tactical" short drama targeted at the current deplorable struggle between the German government and Christian parents over the control of their children's education. We hope to shoot during the month of August, 2008, and complete postproduction in time to submit it to the 2009 San Antonio Independent Christian Film Festival.

The History

Hitler's National Socialist (Nazi) Party passed a series of "cultural purity" laws between 1937 and 1939. Among these were laws specifically mandating state-run public instruction for all children so as to prevent the formation of so-called "parallel societies". The whole purpose was to force a homogeneous culture in Germany. The Nazi policy-makers understood that to influence the next generation, they had to control the children.

The scary thing is that these laws did not quietly go away. Although the majority of the Nazis' policies were summarily ended with the unconditional surrender of the Reich in May 1945, many of these measures stayed on the books. Recently this particular law has been revived by the government as part of their program to stop the loss of their unique heritage. Christian homeschool families have been especially hard-hit. Many families have fled to Austria with only the clothes on their backs, mere hours ahead of the police, just as they did in Hitler's day. Homeschool parents have been fined, placed in prison, their property and children confiscated for trying to teach their children at home. One family has even had to flee Europe for Canada to escape the long arm of the government, which in the EU can even reach them outside of Germany's sovereign borders. The situation is very bad in Germany, and getting worse. We who enjoy freedom in the United States need to pray for our brethren in Germany, who still suffer under Hitler's Law.

You can read our news alert blog at http://hitlerslaw.blogspot.com/, and feel free to send news items to news@hitlerslaw.com.

The Film

Hitler's Law is the newest short project of Young Christian Studios. The story follows Herr & Frau Traugott, German parents in the summer of 1938 who must make a painful decision when the local SS officer demands their children be placed in the state schools. Will they cave to the officer's demands and place their children in the schools, possibly losing their hearts forever? Or will they flee in the night from a town and a house where their family has lived for two hundred years with the clothes on their backs and nothing else? They have only a few short hours to decide...

The film then makes the connection to the present day, where the same laws designed to promote a homogenous society in Nazi Germany are being used to force Christian parents to place their children in the state schools. We are hoping that this short film will wake up American Christians and homeschoolers to the terrible plight of their brethren in Germany and will help to bring an outcry of public opinion against Germany's restrictive education policies.

To complete this project, we need help in every area: funding, equipment, casting, costumes, locations, and post-production. If you live in the Triangle area of North Carolina or even if you don't, and are interested in assisting us with this project, please email us at producer@hitlerslaw.com.

We will have a production blog up soon, Lord willing. In the meanwhile, you can read the initial draft of the script at http://youngchristianstudios.com/hitlerslaw_r1.pdf. The upcoming R3 draft will include certain changes, such as conversion of the "Priest" character to Lutheran minister, but I can't get that draft up until I am able to get back into my laptop, which is having trouble.

Please pray for us, even if you can't help with this project. We have an extremely tight time schedule to shoot it in, and it's going to be a challenge. We believe it's a story that really needs to be told, but usually that means that there will be a struggle to complete it.



In His Service,
John Calvin Young
Writer/Director/Producer, Hitler's Law

Harvest Moon over the Lake

My brother Caleb and I got out with the camera tonight and shot some pretty pictures of the harvest moon's light on the lake. My favorite is one I shot with the hammock and the dock silhouetted against the light. I tweaked the RAW image a little to adjust the contrast, noise reduction, and sharpening, and changed the white balance slightly. I wish I could post more pictures, but I'm working on a tenuous Internet link at the moment and it took over a minute and a half to upload the single cropped .jpg.

More pictures, posts, (and the much-delayed announcement) later...

IHS,
John Calvin Young

Murphy's Law of Announcements

Murphy's Law: If anything can go wrong, it will.

Young's Corollary for Publicly Promoted Announcements: If a definite time for an announcement or a release is made, events will conspire to make it ludicrous or plainly impossible to try to meet the deadline.

Yes, I am here. I am not dead. I am not even dead tired. But there will be no announcement tonight. I registered the domain, I picked the images for the splash screen. I even opened Photoshop and began the layout. That's when my iffy-but-working AC power supply for my laptop decided to fail, apparently irreparably.

30 minutes of fiddling later--still not working. No problem! Web work is by definition portable--I'll just move over to one of the other computers. (BTW, you don't begin to appreciate something like Adobe Photoshop until you have had it and suddenly don't.) So I fired up the trusty-and-free GIMP to finish the job and suddenly it crashes. With an unexplainable error. I download and reinstall GTK+ and GIMP 2.4.6. Twice. With no better results.

Rather than attempting to do it with Microsoft Paint, I decided to have another go at fixing the laptop. 45 minutes, three rubber bands, a piece of aluminum foil and a Norton Anthology of American Literature later, the power blinks on!

Joyfully I power up the laptop, open PS, and am importing my images when it decides to quit. Going back once more to GIMP, I reinstall it again, witness it crash AGAIN, and seized by some kind of desperation, begin disabling any .dll in my system32 folder that comes up with an error message. Finally, at 11:58, I belatedly conclude that apparently I am not to get this announcement out before midnight.

That is the comfort of being a Calvinist--the Lord must have a purpose of some sort behind this--who knows, possibly forcing me to get some sleep so I can get up and get to work in the morning. So I shall. The announcement will come tomorrow or the next day when the Lord enables me to get my electronic world put back together. Apparently it is also time to buy a new AC adapter...

Until then, a teaser...
What occurred on July 6th, 1938 that would have repercussions for the next 70 years? Hint: it's been in the international news a lot lately.

In His Service,
John Calvin Young

Big Announcement Tomorrow!

Anticipate a BIG announcement tomorrow, July 7th, 2008. Today would be better, being the 70th anniversary of a certain extremely relevant event, but it's the Sabbath. So you'll just have to wait until tomorrow.

Hint: it's about a new project. It won't be a big one in budget, but anticipate larger-than-average ripples in the pond.

Until tomorrow...

In His Service,
John Calvin Young