I'd say that "riding a camel in the middle of Dubai" is truly one of the weirder things I have done. I actually was so busy trying to hang on, I could barely take pictures and eventually, thought I was going to be seasick.

Riding a camel is nothing like riding a horse. Their long, bendy legs and ginormous, strange feet make for a really uncomfortable and wobbly ride. I've heard that while they're running, their pace evens out and it's a nice smooth ride. It's not one I was willing to try out.

While in Dubai I got to do quite a few interesting things, namely having a three hour tea in the Burj al Arab (the hotel that looks like a giant sailboat) and becoming addicted to hummus.

The most interesting part, though, was the Falcon Hospital near Abu Dhabi. Falcons are an integral part of the area's history, and though they are no longer used as the hunters they once were, they are still kept by families and are revered almost as family members. So, just like a specialized veterinarian, there is a falcon hospital in the UAE.

Falcons come to the hospital for all sorts of different things, and one is the rather odd concept of replacing a feather. A feather? Yeah- a feather. If a wing feather is broken, they're replaced. The team puts the bird under anesthesia, snips off the offending feather, and glues a new one on. Within ten minutes, the bird is happily flapping around again.

The bird above, I nicknamed "Mork," for the obvious reason that he/she looks like an alien.

All the falcons wore these little leather helmets to blind them. They could see and probably smell each other, but just like horse blinders, what they couldn't see, they ignored. Falcons would attack each other if they could, and of course that's not what you would want to happen. Their helmets were removed when they were fed one at a time- a ritual involving wearing a leather glove and holding a piece of raw quail in it for the bird to crunch and rip its beak through. It was pretty disgusting, if you ask me!

I did get to hold one (not while it was eating!!!) and the vet instructed me to bob my (gloved) hand up and down, and this magnificent bird flapped it wings for me. The wind it created simply blew me away, in more ways than one.

I don't particularly like parrots or big birds (I like ducks, though, but run screaming from geese) and these falcons were nothing like the big scary staring macaws I've seen. The falcon truly was a majestic bird, and I can understand why they have their own passports and get their own plane seat on Emirates airlines.

Well.... mostly understand.

In March of 2008, a group of radio hosts went to Southern Sudan and Darfur on a week long trip to make live reports. They came back with video- lots and lots of video. Over forty hours worth, actually, and it was shot on five different cameras, one of which was an high-def harddrive camera, and another that was an inexpensive still camera in video mode.

Needless to say, the video quality and style of shooting video, was varying dramatically from person to person.

The video that I needed to create while working for Talk Radio News Service was to be seven to eight minutes long and was going to be presented in June 2008 at the Talkers Conference on a very, very big screen. My goal, I was told, was to encapsulate the essence of the trip: what they saw, who they talked to, and what the mission of Christian Solidarity International is.

CSI's mission is to not only help free slaves in Southern Sudan, but to help them survive afterwards with their amazing "Sacks of Hope." After the showing in June 2008, CSI thought the video would be a great tool with which to spread their message, and I was commissioned to extend the video twice as long and add more information about their efforts.

Making the Sudan video- the original one, shown above, and the new one, which CSI is distributing and is shown below- was emotionally tasking. It took me two months to make the first one, and nearly two months to make the second version, and in the beginning I kept getting upset and crying.... it was actually quite depressing, due to the content.

Taking other people's video and editing it is usually difficult. There are many reasons for this: the quality might be bad, the actual videography might need to be majorly corrected (wobbly, off center, bad lighting, etc.), but usually the problem is *content* and by that I mean that I have the difficult task of plucking out the most important bits, and it's ALL important!

I whittled down the goal in my brain to "get the message across." I had to find the main theme within those 40+ hours of video and bring it out for other people to see. Part of the difficultly involved the HD video, which arrived on it's own external harddrive- all 450+ gigs of it, and it took two weeks to completely convert. Then I had to enhance and modify all the lower quality video from the still cameras, and sync up various audio from different sources, namely from a Marantz (which is recorded as mp3).

Additionally, the video wasn't *supposed* to look like it was professionally shot. I had to leave enough wobbles and angles in to leave it just bouncy enough to show that it was shot by a non-pro, yet stable enough to not make people seasick from the camera movement.

I stayed up late. A lot. For four months.

But it was worth it, because at its initial showing in June, I had someone come up to me nearly crying, telling me that it was amazing I could show all that needed to be shown in so short a time and yet still get the message out: there are slaves in Sudan. Hopefully, the second longer version I made for CSI will accomplish the same level of emotion.

I know I'll never forget it.

Video rights: "Talkers Trip to Sudan" is owned by Talk Radio News Service and has been embedded with permission. The extended version, owned by Christian Solidarity International (CSI), has also been embedded with permission.