In filing and editing digital photos I took during the last Sunday-to-Sunday period with my Olympus C-5060, I realized I set a personal picture-taking record. There were 768 5.1 megapixel images totalling 774 megabytes. 354 of the images were from the photo shoot with Jennifer. The rest are from the other events I blogged here on Hiptop Nation. I thumbnailed all the photos, 70% of which fit on my laptop screen to be pictured here.

- mike lee - langley park, md

- mike lee - langley park, md

- mike lee - langley park, md

Our office's holiday party this year was a breakfast this morning. The party team burst forth with creativity and made six special panels about the major types of winter holidays. Then there was the $10 gift exchange followed by an ice cream cake for two birthdays. Two parties done, three more to visit in the next two weeks!

- mike lee - washington, dc

After two more photo sessions today, my creative soul is amply recharged. I call it diversity day, because in continuing my self-assigned work in glamour photography, I am photographing more women of color.

Dainah came over this morning to have herself photographed as she enters her last month of pregnancy. My camera saw a beautiful belly whose equally beautiful owner is more than ready to have relieved.

In the afternoon, I photographed Model Jennifer from Singapore (pictured here). Unbelievably, she is the first asian woman I've photographed in a serious session. Not only is Jen smoking gorgeous, she's brainy with a masters in economics. The high resolution photos from the two-hour session came out awesome.

Now back down to Earth to my day job tomorrow.

- mike lee - baltimore

I was skimming through the sponsor extranet of the Media Lab tonight and noticed a 35-minute RealVideo from May 2002 of Danger co-founder Joe Britt giving a presentation of the first Hiptop and the Danger (Backend) Service. I don't know why I didn't notice this video a year ago when I got my account--maybe they just added it.

Joe demoed the Hiptop UI and basic apps on a protoype HT1 using an overhead Elmo video camera which sent video of the device to the Bartos Auditorium's huge video screen. As always, the audience let out a collective gasp and applauded when Joe first flipped open the Hiptop screen to reveal the keyboard.

Besides the cool cartoon at the end of the PowerPoint, it was all information we know now. The business propositions Joe described are still compelling and relevant today.

- mike lee - baltimore

It turns out that Duff Goldman, owner of Charm City Cakes was who posed as the knife brandishing evil Uncle Tosso during today's first shoot. Duff had to dash off after his scenes to deliver cakes.

A half hour later, the first of seven of Keri's friends started arriving and in the early evening darkness, our living room exploded with costumes, props and make-up. We set up for a group photo to illustrate this passage from the Trixie History:

Trixie spent many horrible years under the thumb of her evil Uncle Tosso after her family was killed in a tragic Elephant Tight Rope accident.

Photo captions: (1) Working on make-up (2) Sad clown (3) Adam "Monkey" Krandle as the Tall man (4) Keri "Trixie" Burneston directs (5) The family (6) Closer in on the family (7) Reviewing images in camera (8) Prepping the tragic Elephant Tight Rope accident scene (9) Cianna watched this whole production from her high chair in the kitchen and giggled a lot.

No elephants were used for the accident scene because I'm going to composite the characters from these digital photo sessions using Photoshop into a diorama or background image in a style inspired by the circus photos of Edward J. Kelty and the opening of the film Moulin Rouge.

We've got at least one more shoot to do, and a bunch of silent film-style title slates to layout. The image sequence will debut at Trixie Little & The Evil Hate Monkey's Valentine's Day Cabaret on February 12th here in Baltimore. I've got to get crackin' and kick some digital sawdust.

- mike lee - baltimore

A great benefit of the rennovations going on in our house is that rooms are being emptied out to be painted. This leaves, for example, our dining room open to use as a temporary photo studio for the next few months.

So today I'm doing two set-ups for the project where we are illustrating the history of Trixie Little and Monkey. The first scene of this not-so-usual day at home is of evil Uncle Tosso posing with knives.

Next up this evening is a group photo of a circus family...

- mike lee - baltimore, md

Cianna is visiting our office today for our division's holiday party and is "re-organizing" mommy's bookshelf.

- mike lee - washington, dc

It's good to see the familiar skyline of D.C. with the Washington Monument as I ride in a taxi up the GW Parkway on the Virginia side of the Potomac Rover on my way to my mom's house. Not so good is the heavy traffic and now the chain of red brake lights ahead of us.

I noticed that I botched at least one of the posts that I hurriedly hacked together during our hectic tour of the lab. In the note about Cameron Marlow, inventor of Blogdex, I meant to add that he says he is now diligently working on scaling the index of blogs up a couple orders of magnitude--from 30,000 to 3,000,000 blogs--in support of the completion of his thesis in March.

- mike lee -