A WET WALK. (29/07/14)

It has been a good couple of days, I’m not a big sunshine fan. It’s nice to see the sun for an hour or two but I don’t enjoy it for days on end. Yesterday I shot another four hours of stills for time lapse. I suddenly looked up from my book and there was a German chap standing in front of the camera listening to it clicking. He wondered why it was left clicking. I explained it would click more productively if he stood to one side and wondered.

He and his middling gorgeous accomplice are parked next door and are great people. They cooked for me last night. Chicken, potatoes, French beans and a mustard and white wine sauce. It turns out he thought I was drying the camera out. They had soaked a baby Canon DSLR the day before. I field stripped it and popped it in my muesli box with a load of silica gel, wrapped up in a bit of old T-shirt. Bingo….it works this morning. It worked at one o’clock this morning, it was a good night. The battery is knackered but what the hell. I gave him the link to a cheapo battery supplier. There is still a bit of fog in there but I’ve told him to get a plastic box from the Spar shop, pop the silica gel in the oven and repeat the process till the fog goes……Don’t even ask why I am the ashamed owner of five kilos of silica gel crystals.

I bounced out of bed at three but didn’t feel too good. I had a glass of milk and went back to bed. No good. I got up again and did a bit of blogging, skimmed through three thousand images looking for errant birds and left the computer converting them to TIFF files while we went for a rainy walk. It takes it a while as there were 64GB worth to do. We must have been out for a while as they were done when I got back.

     Three Cormorants sitting on a rock.

    Just under a dozen Eider Ducks swimming about.

    A few rocks and a dog.

     The same dog playing in the surf. Alf is getting brave. He can swim but is not keen on big waves.

   He now has water up his nose and is wet enough to wander back to the van. I’m surprised the dogs were or Alf was this active because I found Deer Tics on them yesterday so gave them a dose of Front Line. It usually quietens them for a couple of days. Buying it quietens me for a couple of days.

EBB AND FLOW

This is my best yet, not perfect by any means but I feel encouraged. It does involve a lot of faffing about but I enjoy messing. The old Canon FD manual lens does stop a lot of flicker and it means I can leave the camera in Av for four hours letting the camera adjust shutter speed. The first half of this video was shot at 10s intervals in full manual and split when it got too dark and pushed in RAW. The second half at 5s interval in Aperture mode. I have also found that if I duplicate the video time line into a new video layer and shift it one frame then that also helps. A Marks and Spencer plastic bag did the job when it rained. M&S bags don’t have little holes in….well worth saving they are.

TREVOR sent me this link the other day. AUTO PAN /TILT/RAIL. It is a brilliant system, It gave me no end of ideas. The files I shoot are so big that I can do it in post production but not quite as well. It is lovely for the gadget minded but it isn’t practical. There is not a cat in hells chance of my lugging that lot about without a Sherpa or Sherparess or three. Both links are worth a look. Trevor for his infrequent but perfect shots and the second for some middling good time lapse.

Does anyone know anything about Drobo drives?  I need more immediately accessible hard drive for time lapse. I can’t use Cloud as I often don’t have reliable internet access. I need a drive that will plug in via USB3 or Firewire and one I can access whilst editing. I was handling 64GB on the initial work flow of this bit of video.

I am still happy with the laptop, I’ll give PCSpecialists a ring. See if they have a low cost solution.

Have fun.