Sunday, August 26: Salt Lake City
This car definitely looks lived in
After breakfast, we went to the convention center to catch a live broadcast/taping of “Music and the Spoken Word”. When we got there, they seemed to be in the middle of the show, but it turns out that was the middle of the dress rehearsal. They finished just after 9. Then they practiced a few short bits, took a break, and then went live for the real broadcast at 9:30.
Amy tried to take some pictures during the rehearsal. Unfortunately, for the first time on the trip, I had forgotten to take her camera battery out of the charger and put it back in the camera that morning. So when she tried her camera, it had no battery. There wasn’t enough time for me to go back to the car and get my camera, so we got no photos.
I found myself looking at it like an engineer. There were some big screens showing what was going out on the air. I found myself playing the game of “where’s the camera?” That is, based on the camera angle from what was being broadcast, i tried to figure out where the camera was.
There was one obvious boom camera. That was the easy one. Then there were two cameras on poles in front. Then there were implied cameras up where the lights were. I couldn’t see them, but they must have been there. Finally, there were a couple of guys with hand-held cameras.
It was amazing to watch. During the organ solo, they had the boom camera looking at the organist from various angles over his left shoulder. There were also two guys with a camera focused on his hands from just to his right. When the boom camera pulled back for a wider shot, it stopped just fractionally short of the other camera guys. From looking at the video, you had no idea that there were two guys with a camera close enough to touch the organist.
The other thing that drove me crazy was that every now again there was a long distance shot of the whole stage area. Try as I could, I couldn’t see the two tower cameras that were just in front of the stage. I don’t know how they did it. Based on the angle, I didn’t think that the long distance camera was coming in from high above the tower cameras. I almost wonder if the long-distance shots were canned, figuring that from that distance you can’t see if they are in sync with the music or not.
Then we had a bit of quiet time back at the hotel.
Just after lunch, Amy went off to church, while I watched Mike back at the hotel. The ulterior motive was that Amy was going to see if she could find a home for some of the camping supplies (e.g. cooler, butane) that we couldn’t take back with us.
When Amy got back, we finished cleaning out the car and then cleaning the car. That was pretty scary. Amy had found a home for our surplus camping stuff with her church, so we drove the stuff over there, then started looking for dinner. The first few places we looked at either were closed or didn’t grab us. Eventually we decided to try the Cheesecake Factory, as we hadn’t gotten in the previous day.
We ended up parked in East Oshkosh and then hiking to the restaurant (which fortunately was open despite it being a Sunday). There was no line and we got in immediately.
After dinner, Amy and Mike walked to Temple Square, while I hiked back to the car and bought it closer. I found them, and we spend a while wandering through the various buildings. The sun went down, giving a really nice lighting to the temple. Looking west, the clouds were an eerie pink-orange color. We tried driving up the hill past the state house to get a better view of the sunset, but we were a few minutes too late.
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