I spent a couple of weeks in Canada at the end of the summer, and this weekend I finally got around to putting together a highlight reel from the footage I shot along the way, my first attempt at DSLR video. You can enjoy my efforts above; the clips at the end are not by me, but were filmed with a helmetcam by my guide for an activity called EdgeWalk. You can read my account of that on everything2, and there’s a longer video showing off my (sometimes less than confident!) attempts at the various challenges we were set along the way.
If you prefer stills, there are flickr galleries for Montreal and Toronto (2011); as planned this has given me an opportunity to revisit my previous shots, so I’ve added further sets for Toronto (2009) and Niagara Falls.
Finally, I also found the time to give a maths talk whilst I was out there, at the University of Waterloo – details and slides are in this Modulo Errors post.
One of Bristol’s summertime attractions is its Balloon Fiesta and, weather permitting, for a few days in August the skies above the city fill with balloons. One of the advantages of living in the village thesedays is that I can walk to the suspension bridge in a couple of minutes, so once the twitter feed confirmed the first launches I was able to catch then on their ascent from Ashton court. Here’s the set on flickr.
A week later, I was lucky enough to be able to experience the reverse angle, taking to the skies with Bristol balloons for a flight across Bristol and beyond. Helping with the ropes during the inflation was a sufficient distraction from my pre-flight nerves, but I needn’t have worried, as it’s possibly the calmest method of transport I’ve encountered – until you ‘land’, at least! (In our case, ‘crash into a hillside’ would be a better description). We drifted up and over Clifton and the north of Bristol, before trading the city for rolling countryside, ending up (after about an hour) in a field near a place called Rangeworthy, about twelve miles from the take-off point. It really was an ideal evening: despite the day before and after being a wash-out, we were blessed with dry weather; it was windy enough to make swift progress but not enough to cause problems; there was plenty of scenery to admire, in gorgeous light due to the approaching sunset; and I had the company of good friends too. It’s not cheap, but I’d say it’s definitely worth it.
I’ve completed a project I’ve been working on for far too long now – porting photographic highlights from my various foreign travels to flickr. Presumably in an attempt to ward off Russell’s Paradox, they have a strange distinction between sets and collections. So I’ve created a root collection – travel, with sub-collections for each trip, which contain sets for particular locations (cities or countries depending on the scale of the journey). Then tagging takes over below that, although their usefulness depends on how detailed an assortment of tags I’m prepared to use (and whether I’ve remembered to use them all where appropriate!).
If all that sounds far too confusing, here’s a reverse-chronological summary:
That’s an almost-complete list of my wanderings since I got my own passport (suprisingly late in life): notable omissions are my very first trip (to Oslo, in 2004) due to a lack of decent camera kit then; and 2009′s Toronto trip, as I’m going back in September and will probably get better versions of some of my shots from then! There are a few locations I’ve neglected above, though, and I’ve a long way to go before the geo-tagging is even close to complete. I’m also wondering what to do with the stories that go with the pictures (or that don’t have a picture to go with)- for at least my own future benefit I’d like to keep track of them, whilst recognising that there’s nothing particularly special about my opinions on a given restaurant or tourist attraction. Whether I go for a full-fledged blog or more thoroughly annotate the flickr entries is something I’m still debating.
The next big task, though, is to try and impose some order on all my photos of Scotland, then upload the best of those.
The third Bath Upchuck juggling convention was (due to the magic of February’s 28 days) exactly a month ago today, and I’m still wading through the footage… This year I was a bit more organised on the day, and claimed one of the squash courts as a slow motion film studio for a couple of hours. You can view the highlights above – as well as some stills from wandering with the dSLR – but I promised to compile reels for each individual performer, and those are taking time. Still, I managed to post a video each evening of last week, and should be able to do the same for the next, so keep checking the dedicated playlist or the feed on the right. We also had a 3d lens set up on the 550d for video, so stay tuned for news of that!
I was contacted at the start of the month by a director from NHK’s Tokudane Toko Doga which – as best I can tell – is a ten minute weekly broadcast on interesting youtube videos. Glide had caught their attention, and last week I had the slightly surreal experience of an interview over skype, via an interpreter. The clip above is today’s show, and a few of my slow motion projects appear, between 03:30 and 05:16. Since I don’t speak Japanese I don’t have much idea what’s going on; my first soundbite was in response to the question “What did you feel when you first saw the video?”, and the second is me butchering the name of the show There’s also an entry on their blog, but I can’t read that either!
There’s also an entry on 
