Saturday 03/23/2024
Started the day, dressed in my red docent shirt, meeting Harriet for coffee. She’s a basketball friend from way back.
Then on to the museum to lead a private tour for 25 seniors from Carmel. The leader of that group was David Wall, a trustee of the museum. The tour description said he would lead the tour but would like a docent to help. What we ended up doing was, to divide the group in half and each led one tour. He started in the Software area to give me a head start. I edited myself on the fly to shorten my usual tour, finished in 45 minutes. Handed them back to Mr. Wall to get them into the 1401 demo at 1pm.
There’s an AV problem raised by David M, that we don’t put enough light on our presenters which makes them look on the video recordings as if they were in the shadow. This is with presenters who have slides to show, which is most of them. If even a bit of the projection screen is in the camera frame, it sees that brightness and stops down, making the image of the presenter shadowy, low-contrast.
So the solution would be to get more light onto that corner of the stage where we put our podium. But our stage lights are up in tracks on the ceiling. I contacted Dan Nitzan, whom I first met on Day 3.216 back in 2022. He is among other things, an expert on stage lighting. He replied at once and since he lives close, came over this afternoon.
Dan proposed how we could re-aim two of our track lights to put more on the presenter. We got the on-duty facilities guy to bring us a ladder and Dan climbed to the top of an 8-foot ladder to reach the ceiling and remove one of the light units. Unfortunately it was somewhat tricky to put it back and its little copper tabs got bent. So Dan took it to his nearby home to repair it. He brought it back an hour later and we tried to reinstall it, this time on a different one of our tracks. And ended up with two non-functional light heads. So not a success. Now we are trying to find compatible light units to buy online to replace the two we have screwed up.
Codgerville 