Thursday 28 January 2010

Advice please...

The plan was simple. Attach a dogcam to an air cadet's flying helmet and pop him or her into an aeroplane and film the flight. Simple. (I refuse to say Simples on principle!)

Except that the people who own the aeroplane don't want to do it with the dogcam, they want to do it handheld instead.

Now, that asks an interesting question. Whilst I can't see any problem with using a handheld camera inside an aeroplane whilst it's flying along quite nicely and above all straight, What on earth happens when it turns?

Not sure what I'm talking about? Well put it this way, when you corner in your car, if you do it slowly then you don't really notice much. If you are a bit more enthusiastic and do track days, you'll note that anything not bolted down gets thrown from one side of the car to the other when you try and go around that chicane. The question is, if an aeroplane does a tight turn, which way does the force go on the camera? Is it likely to produce a force large enough to remove the handheld camera from the hand, so to speak? What about Aerobatics? In short, how do you film inside an aircraft with a hand held camera?

Mounted cameras, easy - I've seen plenty of videos done that way and it's the way I'd nominally do it. Hand held asks so many questions. Sure, if it was a big airliner then handheld is no problem, but a little light aircraft?

So I'm stuck. Any suggestions? Anyone done it?

And yes, I have seen this : Isn't life easy with mountable cameras?


Monday 18 January 2010

How long have I been doing this?

I missed something, I've now been doing this blog for a year! woo! *blows ridiculous party hooter thingy*

That is all.

Sunday 17 January 2010

Plans

Or lack of them, at the moment. Having just applied for one job, I seem to be left with time on my hands. Again.

At least I've got a whole year of teaching air cadets, and even better is the year of motorsport I've got lined up, Including a 24 hour race. I'm quite looking forward to that.

More plans - well I'm currently working on some programme ideas (again) and there's the 3 minute wonders to work out. Hopefully they'll go somewhere nice.

Other than that, trying to figure out where all my website visitors come from (some from twitter, lots from USF1 Journal and some who just seem to turn up, welcome to you all!) Things are rather quiet.

I therefore leave you with the last of the time lapse experiments.




The irony was that a week afterwards we got a LOT of snow, and I was out when it started! Bother!

Wednesday 6 January 2010

Happy new year!

A happy new year to you all! I'm writing this in the midst of a big freeze as the news stations are insisting on calling it - The only problems I've got is the sheet ice preventing me moving my car (nothing some grit won't solve), and urchins throwing snowballs!

Over Christmas I made a mistake, and took part time night work at Sainsbury's. This was a mistake because working in the night proved to be able to drive me insane. I don't mind hard work, but hard work which goes unappreciated and accompanied by a system of bullying is enough to really drive me nuts.

But enough about that. Christmas was great with some interesting presents (you'll see one of them in a moment), and for once was white. Before Christmas I may have mentioned I was on work experience... I was logging rushes for a company called Boomerang, and their programme called "Children of Prisoners". It's on from Feburary 10th, and I should be very grateful if you watch the series, and look out for a familiar name on the credits. I've still got some work to do on that, so once again, watch this space.

Now, there's snow around, so that means it's time for the timelapse experiments again... Attempt one was set up in the hope of snow, and is 24 hours around here, Unfortunately, Autofocus in the dark is not a good idea...


Then snow finally turned up - right when I wasn't expecting it to - so turn on the timelapse camera quick! Caught 12 hours of snow melting.



There's a third part to this, and I'll show you that later.


So, to 2010. One of my Christmas presents was a new car - a VW Polo to replace my reliable, but aging Peugeot 106. I took it down to Southerndown (bad wolf bay, for you Dr Who fanatics) for some pictures and to enjoy the drive and mangaged to get this shot of the sunset. I wonder where these wheels will take me over the next year, and are there better times over that horizon*? We'll see

*actually over that horizon is Devon.