Using a small tripod and scraps from an old bike lock I found a way to secure a HD camera on the back of a professional custom racing yacht. With a fast moving yacht, fast moving rigging and needing to move fast so as to counter weight and to leave all vital boat paraphernalia clear and accessible, getting a steady shot is quite a challenge.
A ‘Manfrotto modo’ tripod can be adapted into a small monopod, great for travel and taking just about anywhere. Using part of a bike lock, inner tube, tape and rubber I constructed a tripod modification to enable the tripod head to be fixed to a varying diameter of metal rails.
Just prior to the Artemis Transat race in 2008 from Plymouth, UK to Boston, US across the Atlantic I had the opportunity to spend a day sailing on one of the boats in the ‘open 40’ (forty foot) class. It was shot for use with a dome screen, so stretched over a nine meter concave screen the viewer feels like they are sat on the boat too. The idea behind dome screens AKA immersive cinemas is to give the viewer a sense of telepresence or “being there”, the screen (and footage shot) takes into account the viewers eye line, blind spots and angle of the horizon.
Photographer? Broke? Stingy? Rather do it the hard way?….. Good, that’s healthy!…probably, read on!…
Providing you have been to your local craft/arts supply store and bought:
1. Foam board
2. Gaffer tape/duct tape
3. Scalpel
4. Meter rule (or anything with a straight flat edge)
5. Pen
6. Opaque thin paper / white large carrier bag
It is completely possible to construct this in less than an hour, maybe even faster if you use power tools instead of a scalpel. Well we may begin…
Draw a huge “X” corner to corner using the pen and meter rule on the foam board
How big is your flash gun/light source? Well a hole this big needs to be marked out and cut, roughly measure out the size you want the rectangular back to be, mark it, then a smaller square/rectangle for the hole in the centre where you’ll poke your flash gun through
Now using the smaller square (lets call it…erm, the light hole) in the centre as a guide and the corners of the bigger square (the back), mark out out an area to cut
Cut with scalpel (see image below)
Score the lines in of the bigger box, allowing the board to bend neatly
Cut the centre hole
Grab the gaffer tape, fold the sides… do what feels right and natural!
Almost done… Finally it needs something to diffuse the light, opaque paper may work well, I just used the bag that the foam board came in! Put the paper/bag/or whatever on the front… duct tape it!
DONE!
Put the flash on a tripod/table/person follow your usual wireless flash set up, start shooting (or go back to work as the hour’s probably up by now)
You could even buy two pieces of foarm board and now you have a budget reflector too!
After going to my end of University summer ball last night, i looked around and saw allot of people who i may never see again; friends, acquaintances and friends of friends i may never meet. All quite symbolic of what has been and gone and the next stage in adulthood. Time flys when you having fun!
I’m glad someone has done this! Calls to virgin media are a guaranteed way to raise you blood pressure. My service still isn’t perfect, I’m paying for 20Meg broadband and allot of the time can barely open a web page its so slow. Although for the sake of my own sanity, acquiescence is easier than calling them up to sort it out!
I have 69GB worth of tga’s rendered out for my 4d project, and 61GB of space on this mac…delete 8GB!?… nope, the drive is an NTFS partition.. meanining that on a mac its read only. What about the other partition the fat32 partition on my external HD?… again, nope… you can’t write more than 4gb to a fat drive at once, else it will break….
Options remaining:
copy files to the raid via the mac?: Nope, the mac no longer see’s the raid
copy over the network?: Nope, annoyingly enough the mac can see other computers, but not access them
find an external mac (hfs+) formatted external drive? Nope, windows cant read hfs or hfs+, and i need windows to write tga’s to 7th format…..
This computer has a windows partition (with 11gb free) if i reboot in windows and go on a delting mission maybe i could copy files to the NTFS partition from the mac, or render out the tga’s in after effects again, then finally write them to my external NTFS external HD….
This is where my time goes! doing trivial tasks like this!
After turning down the opportunity to go climbing today in favor of getting some course work done, I reached the point of thinking i need some better distractions than the likes of email, msn and Facebook… I have a hard drives worth of unwatched films… but that’s a little too lazy. I don’t watch TV, but with the likes of celeb big brother and x-factor being the current standard UK television I’m surprised anyone bothers to be honest. I also have a whole book shelf of books I’ve collected, yet not really got around to reading. Also if I’m in search of a short break from writing my dissertation or project work, then surely i should go for something more mind numbing… or something. Furthermore i don’t really feel like i have justified the purchase of my new PC, other than successfully batching Photoshop jobs fairly fast…. So, i thought I’d get something to give the ram and graphics card a good test.
I haven’t played video games since i sold my ps2 to go traveling back in 2004, and i must say i haven’t particularly missed them. Still, I thought I’d have a look at the latest tomb raider release from Eidos. Back in my teens tomb raider 2 took up a large portion of my time and proved to be a pretty addictive game.
This latest release, is the eighth one is the series and has a few more bells and whistles the versions i was playing a decade ago; the graphics being the first obvious difference. Its based around the Ancient Mayan calendar, it sees Lara Croft travelling around the globe, shooting up the local wildlife and stealing priceless relics from graves etc… I think there’s a long-running narrative now, but anyway….it seems to have a pretty cool sound track, and almost magical game-play. After what i thought would be a quick look i have managed to waste a considerable amount my day; and and seriously considering un-installing it, before it gets any more addictive!
Screenshot of Lara doing savage looking mantle to top-out:
Heres another one of our heroine, doing a bit of bare-foot soloing:
With a new wireless card in my laptop i am writing this from the mac partition on my laptop. Its a ‘Hi-Grade’ laptop, Intel chip set, sony dvd writer and a marvel yukon ethernet adapter… I haven’t tested the Ethernet yet, system profiler recognizes the majority of the hardware. All seems to work well without having to muck about with kexts too much. The new dell Wlan card needed some drivers that i found online for the windows partition, which although wouldn’t install via the executable, would when installed manually.
Its the end of term one at uni, seem to have got very little sleep in the last week trying to learn/make things with Actionscript 3.0. I think in future, i may stick to trying to extract blood from rocks.
On the upside of life, there is the mention of getting out of england over the ‘Christmas break’… France or Spain could be a possible new year choice .
I now have a mac partition on my desktop (inspiron 530) and my laptop (ironically named “Hi-Grade”) however i must say the install on my laptop seems better than my desktop…
I’ve been installing kexts (kernal extension files) what with drivers missing when you install Kalyway. I found sound drivers for my desktop, which was previously a problem… and in a delirious state at some ungodly hour of the morning over the weekend i managed to install somthing that made my machine pick up its 4cores (instead of one).
With the laptop i had to skip past the welcome screen that it seems to get stuck on, using single user mode, there is some code to tell the OS that the setup is done:
Which does work, as long as you set the passwd correctly when prompted, unlike myself who after doing that, had multiple tries guessing my new username and login details at the startup screen… then eventually, i ended up back in single user mode looking through folders to try and rectify it.
To cut a long story short, its alot of spending time in forums, installing kexts (which may actually break your working OS) and i may have to buy some new hardware to make Internet work.
So… seems worth doing, possibly at a time when there are no imminent coursework deadlines
After my brand new machine has arrived, i have decided to put macOSX on it using a patched version of leopard. Kalyway and Leo4all seem to be the main contenders. Although unfortunately its not quite as simple as boot from the disk and hey presto, you;ve just turned your new dell into a mac book pro…
In fact, one has to format the/each partition of your HD into mac extended journalled (which is a given really!), but also making sure that the primary partition is where the OS is installed, and that its bootable and has all read/write permissions….
If all goes to plan then the correct kernels must be installed to allow some functions to work properly, and the correct drivers must also be installed (easier said than done)
So far my ‘hackintosh’ thinks that its a mac pro with a single core (its quad core), no sound card, no network card and a graphics card incapable of running Quartz extreme…Thats just from a quick glance…
I have had more success with kalyway than leo4all, as leo4all just left me with at the start up, single user mode being the best it could achieve :S
…..Still, i’ll keep an update on it, only the second day i’ve had my PC… i think i’ve not broken it just yet *fingers crossed*
After downloading ‘SuperDuper’ and copying an image from my friends MacBookPro onto my G5… and giving the inside a complete hoover, and using disk utility in target disk mode from a friends machine… i am still getting kernel panic screens and loading up into open firmware saying “invalid memory access” it could be my ram, alternatively it could be because the macbook i copied data from is Intel based not power pc based…
I’m Testing the new release of ‘flock’ browser, i generally use it for blogging and batch photo uploading…although the new release is focused on social networking…trying to integrate facebook, youtube, flickr, twitter, digg, delcious etc etc into one browser.
Just prior to the Artemis Transat race in 2008 from Plymouth, UK to Boston, US across the Atlantic I had the opportunity to spend a day sailing on one of the boats in the ‘open 40’ (forty foot) class. It was shot for use with a dome screen, so stretched over a nine meter concave screen the viewer feels like they are sat on the boat too. The idea behind dome screens AKA immersive cinemas is to give the viewer a sense of telepresence or “being there”, the screen (and footage shot) takes into account the viewers eye line, blind spots and angle of the horizon.
With a new wireless card in my laptop i am writing this from the mac partition on my laptop. Its a ‘Hi-Grade’ laptop, Intel chip set, sony dvd writer and a marvel yukon ethernet adapter… I haven’t tested the Ethernet yet, system profiler recognizes the majority of the hardware. All seems to work well without having to muck about with kexts too much. The new dell Wlan card needed some drivers that i found online for the windows partition, which although wouldn’t install via the executable, would when installed manually. 
