Canon Rebel and some new photos

A new macro shot that I got with my fam's new Canon EOS Rebel T3

Photo that I got of Tyler Joseph and Josh Dunn of Twenty One Pilots at their sold out show at the LC in Columbus.

My cat, Paprika (shot with the Canon Rebel)

New Camera/ Crazy and awful looking hair

Just got a Canon Rebel T3, which is awesome and I've been getting some new photos. The only one that's not shot with the T3 is the Twenty One Pilots' concert pic.

~Elijah

photo contest winner

I just one a local photo contest with this photo

~Elijah

More Beautiful

Recently I was scanning through my twitter feed when I saw that someone had tweeted on simple line

"God must become more beautiful than our idols."~Anonymous

That stuck with me a lot. It continued to run through my head over and over. "God must become more beautiful than our idols." The profound message that I got out of it continued to turn over and over in my brain. 

Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. ~Matthew 22:36-38

 That is the "Greatest commandment". We must love God with ALL our heart mind and soul. The problem is in this day and age we often get caught up in the fact that God loves us so we love God and so on and so forth, but we love God just as much as we love everything else.

So much of the time we deal with this. We want to stop loving and we know that God can help us, but the problem is that we still see our idols as more beautiful than God. 

Before we can be free from our idols, we must love God more than we love them. It's a choice. We cannot love this world and God at the same time we can only love the things of this love, because God has loved us. 

So think about it. We have to get past our doubts about who God and the myths that we believe about Him and then we need to make God as beautiful as He is. When we love God that much, our idols can collapse, because the cannot compare to the beauty of our God and father. 

Just some thoughts

~Elijah 

Lost in the Dark

I recently finished writing another song! Sometime I'd like to release a track for it, but since I'm such a perfectionist it never sounds right when I self produce with vocals!

This song is called, "Lost in the Dark". It's a very sad song! I wrote it for a friend, and as you can probably tell the emotions expressed in the song are anger or resentment. I'm not going to tell the whole story of the song, but I will say a bit. It is from my perspective talking to a friend who is searching for something more in their life!  It's one of my shorter songs lyrically and it's very simple. Still I think it's powerful overall! Enjoy!

Verse: 

So many questions are there answers? You ask as day turns to night,

Your voice breaks the silence, as you yell at the sky, Is there no light?

Chorus:

Woahhhh, where are you now? Are you lost? Do you know? Do you know where you are?

Do you know? Do you know? Are you lost in the dark?

Verse 2: 

You run from the silence, the only way out is to join the one way crowd,

Lost and abandoned, join all the rest as they slowly progress toward their deaths

(Chorus 2X)

Bridge: 

Can you see the light? Through the walls crashing down, the dark all around,

Can't you see through? Can a veil of lies keep you subdued?

(Chorus starting on subdued)

Outro: Are you lost in the dark? (fade)

 ~Elijah  (song by me 2012) 

 

Are you lost in the dark?

New Music Tuesday (Fireflight NOW)

Yesterday, Christian rock band, Fireflight (Flicker Records) released it's 4th record. Though, I haven't gotten the album yet, I have had the great honor to listen the entire record! Since Fireflight's last record, "For Those Who Wait", the band has improved greatly, even though the last release was also superb.

                           FOUR STARS

 the vid for Stay Close

I highly recommend that you listen to and buy the new album! It is one of my favorite rock release of the year so far.

Enjoy
~Elijah

How do artists survive (in the digital age)???

This is a really hard question that continues to challenge many bands and musicians around the world!
The main problems seem to be:

• People can listen to music for free on sites like YouTube, Spotify, and many others
• In the digital age albums don't sell, and it's hard to create single after single. 
• In the digital age music pirating has become easy and fans don't seem to feel bad about stealing music. 

These are all pretty big "problems" or dilemmas. YouTube doesn't seem like too much of a problem. For most people it's still more convenient to just buy the music. Spotify does seem to be a problem, though. You can listen to full albums on your iPod touch or iPhone,  because you can get the app. I don't think you have to pay either! Artists still receive a small amount of money for every play on Spotify, but nothing great. As a rule, I try to listen to people's music and then get it on Guvera or iTunes. Either spotify should pay artists more or there should be a limit on how much music you listen to or something.

Albums don't seem to sell either. It takes a lot for even a good artist to make an album that is extremely full and worth getting,  but now even if there are good albums we think "single-mindedly". I admit that I tend to get singles, but I listen to whole albums and get all the songs I like even if they're not very popular. Artists do get a lot more substantial money from an album than they do a single unless it goes completely viral. I like iTunes and Amazon's idea to do "Album only" singles. I mean I understand that many people who download music don't wanna spend a lot of money, myself included, but when they offer a ten song album for 8 dollars, it's not gonna kill you!

Pirating is SUCH a big problem! It's amazing, because people feel so guiltless about stealing music from other people! As a musician I know how it would feel to have people stealing the music that keeps you going! The internet has made is so easy to steal entire albums without getting caught and it makes it hard for artists to stay alive, especially smaller bands, who don't have a huge fan following. Guvera is an amazing LEGAL music download site. It has most pop and urban albums from the most popular artists, with more being added all the time. You get credits from advertisers and Guvera itself (usually three credits a week), but it still pays the artists just as much as iTunes. It's great! The only annoying thing is that it doesn't have most small artists or any artists from certain record labels. Still! I've probably gotten 100 or more songs for free and also granted money to the artists. Noisetrade is also great! It has a lot of Indie and Singer/songwriter music and a lot of smaller bands, but it's entire albums (many being epic) for free! there is no limit on what you can get. Usually it's smaller artists, who put their stuff on there, but there are some big artists like Fun* and Owl City*.  freechristianmusicblog.com is another way to find out about free Christian music :D

  ~Elijah

Random Photos

photo of my by a friend

My sister, Caris,  (by me)

photo of me by a friend.

~Elijah