So much happening
Monday, May 12th, 2008
It’s been a while since I’ve updated this — and a lot has been going on.
The first of the 2 camping trips was … interesting.
It was a little badly organised form the start — they decided on a venue 2 days before leaving, hired a minibus and arainged for another car to go and 5 people to go on a train. I was on the train, and I was told what time to be at the station. Only when I got to the station did I ifnd out that the venue (knockongoroch farm) was a little outside Aire — IE the middle of fricken nowhere.
We were to be picked up by said minibus at the station.
After changing trains in glasgow, we got to Aire station at about 2200, black dark, pouring with rain. We got a phone call:
“ah sorry guys you’ll have ot catch a taxi … the car broke down, and the minibus is upside down in a river”
10 minutes later realisation set in that this infact was not a prank, and it was actually real.
We found a taxi rank, and persuided a taxi driver it was worthwhile. £40 he said, fair enough, it’s a bit of a tight situation we’re in, and there are 5 of us.
We drove for a long time, then pulled up at the end of a road “It’s a bit rough, so I won’t go up, but it’s a couple of hundred yards up there round the corner” he said.
So (2300 now BTW) we walked round the corner and found a bunch of houses, no camp site, so we scratched out heads for a bit, called the folks at the camp who told us to look for a wooden bridge… the hell? We also heard from the folks in the car, they were in a tow truck heading * towards * the camp site — nutters.
We eventually went ot a house, and knocked on the door, a very nice lady came to the door and siad “knockenwhere? … oh there… you’re a long way from there…
As near as I could work out, the back wheel of the minibus had missed a bridge after a corner, and went over sideways, noone was significantly hurt, unless you consider a £750 insurance excess hurt.
The people in the car spent 6 hours in the middle of the night walking in the “200 yard” road to the camp site, with no torch. They arrived at 5AM.
From there it improves very little, but that’s most of the noteworthy stuff. I had always used the polacy of having a plan B, but will be taking it more seriusly form now on.
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The second camping trip was much more boring, involving lots of water, and a fire that wouldn’t burn.
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Beltane happened eventually It was very wet — we lost significant quantities of kit to water damage, all of mine was ok, but it wasn’t good.
The rain caused significant issues with actually filming too, rain spots, foged and rained up glasses/viewfinders were a running theme, many shots were lost due to this.
Due to the above distractions a lack of time practicing before hand and some bad decisions, my results were moderate at best, 24ish “good” images, only one of which I’m really proud of. see here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/thingomy/sets/72157604867745859/
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I’ve been suckered into shooting some marathon/walk thing up the west highland way — it also involves the middle of nowhere, running theem here eh? It should be good, but if I do the bit I think I will be doing, it’s going to involve a 13 mile walk with camera gear, and camping gear for 2 nights, I’m not sure whether I’m up to it, but I’m willing to give it a stab.
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Final point, and the reaosn I started this somewhat long post — I assembled a panoramic from NZ.
It’s taken from the top of Sky Tower Auckland:
This along with some other stuff I;ve done recently has shown me that I have lost all of my photoshop abilites.
A couple of years ago I switched from Paintshop Pro to Photoshop, on the understanding that Photoshop was better, in doing this switch, I lost all of my PSP abilities, and never actually gained any with Photoshop. I havent used any of these skills since then so have been lacking in practice.
I am now unable to do simple tasks like correct white balance, or deforming a selection. That is without a vast quantity of arsing around, googling, frustrating experiments, and very sub standard results. The worst bit is, I normally can’t remember which tools exist for a given job, and even then I don’t understand why it didn’t do what I wanted it to do the first time, and when it does work it seem to be a complete unexplainable accedent; so I’m not even learning while working.
The panoramic above was built using 84 images of 2.5MP each. I was only able to get the software I use (Hugin) to do part of the job, so it’s really rough, with hard image borders everywhere. with any kind of luck I can perfect the technequedo some more interesting stuff with it in future.