Author: chris

Pilot, sailor, photographer, skier, geek!
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WorldWide Photowalk

The Worldwide Photowalk organised by Scott Kelby took place on Saturday 18 July. Roughly 30,000 photographers took part in 900 cities around the world.

We went on the local Portsmouth walk. We met in Southsea at 5pm and spent two hours walking and snapping our way around Old Portsmouth until retiring to the Bridge Tavern for some refreshment.

More photos on my flickr feed and on the Worldwide Photowalk website.

[Update: There’s now a flickr group for the Portsmouth Photowalk!]

Portsmouth
Portsmouth PO1 2, UK

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Test post from Posterous

Posterous is a new service that allows you to post to multiple sites in one go from an email account. Once you’ve opened your free account, you add services such as Twitter, Flickr, Facebook and your WordPress blogs to your posterous options, then an email to post@posterous.com adds it to all your sites.

Posterous also reads and posts photos, videos, audio URLs and many other file types and adds them automatically.

All very easy, and probably the simplest way to blog when on the move.

Posted via email from Chris Parker’s posterous

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Pittsburgh Skyscraper’s Famous Morse Code Signal Actually Spells “Pitetsbkrrh”

From gizmodo.com:

Pittsburgh, PA’s 33-story Grant Building famously spells out the name of the city in Morse Code so brightly it can be seen for over 100 miles. Except it doesn’t actually spell Pittsburgh, but “Pitetsbkrrh.” Eep.

A former HAM radio enthusiast and Pittsburgh local, Tom Stapleton, decoded the message and posted the gaffe on YouTube, and it clearly shows the tower’s misspelling. He said he noticed the problem when he casually looked up and saw the signal broadcasting the letter K, which he remembered well as it’s the first letter of his sister’s name. Too bad “Pittsburgh” doesn’t contain the letter K. Representatives of the tower’s owners could not say how long the tower had been advertising Pitetsbkrrh. [Pittsburgh Post-Gazette]

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Mi-24 “Hind” Model

OK, I know this blog is in danger of turning into “my favourite things on the web”, but this is a great video of a large-scale flying model of a Hind (NATO codename for the Mi-24).

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Time Lapse with an iPhone

Inspired by this post, I purchased TimeLapse from the iTunes Store (£1.19) and installed it on my iPhone. I then propped the iPhone up against my window and set it to record one image every 20 seconds for 90 minutes. I used QuickTime Pro to open the image set and save it out as a movie, then cropped and resized in Final Cut Pro (but there’s probably an easier way). Here’s the result:

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The Olympus PEN Story

Olympus have produced this wonderful stop motion video to celebrate 50 years of the PEN.

This is the PEN Story in stop motion. We shot 60.000 pictures, developed 9.600 prints and shot over 1.800 pictures again. No post production! Thanks to all the stop motion artists who inspired us. …

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Sailing

Weymouth Dawn
Weymouth Dawn
Just had four days’ sailing in a Jeanneau Sun Odyssey 35 on the South Coast. Port Solent – Poole – Weymouth – Yarmouth – Lymington – Port Solent. Great weather. Lots of pics on flickr.

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Olympus E-P1 Preview

Imaging Resource have got a preview of the new Olympus E-P1.

The E-P1 is a Micro Four Thirds format camera. Put simply, it’s a DLSR with the mirror removed to make a much smaller camera. The lenses are interchangeable and a 17mm f/2.8 and 14-42mm f3.5-5.6 will be available at launch in July. The sensor is the same 12.3 megapixel sensor used in the Olympus E-30 and E-620 DSLRs.

Also available will be an external flash (FL-36R and FL-50R will work as well), an optical viewfinder and adapters to connect OM and Four Thirds lenses to the Micro Four Thirds mount.

More on the Imaging Resource and Olympus sites

Hmmmm. Lust.

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Rendezvous in Paris

Update: The video doesn’t seem to be on YouTube any more but a copy can still be seen on this website.

On an August morning in 1978, French filmmaker Claude Lelouch mounted a gyro-stabilized camera to the bumper of a Ferrari 275 GTB and had a friend, a professional Formula 1 racer, drive at breakneck speed through the heart of Paris.

The film was limited for technical reasons to 10 minutes; the course was from Porte Dauphine, through the Louvre, to the Basilica of Sacre Coeur. No streets were closed, for Lelouch was unable to obtain a permit. The driver completed the course in about 9 minutes, reaching nearly 140 mph in some stretches. The footage reveals him running real red lights, nearly hitting real pedestrians and driving the wrong way up real one-way streets.

Wikipedia entry