Finding the time to enjoy the Cycling season this spring was complicated. Between the rain and bad weather it was hard to find two days in a row with good weather. As a consequence of this I have not been very active. I set myself the goal of cycling 50 kilometres per week which is conservative and I have been unable to reach that goal. During this time I am really happy about one thing. I started climbing every Thursday…
It is interesting to watch Slow motion climbing because you get to see precisely what people are doing. You get to see how each muscle group is moving and you see how much the body swings as someone jumps from one hold to another. It allows you to appreciate the subtlety of the moves. People like to say that rock climbing is about technique rather than strength but it is evident from these slow motion sequences that muscle groups are…
In recent months we have seen articles about self driving cars and ethics. The question the research asks is whether to kill, a group of people, the driver of the car or others. The question is perfectly logical if you have never driven a car. If you have never driven a car then you believe that accidents may be unavoidable. So these guys posed these kinds of ethical dilemmas to several hundred workers on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to find out…
When I think of Great Britain I think of the BBC and I think of the Natural History Units. I also think of radio programs like In Our Time, From Our Own Correspondent and Hard Talk. I also think of BBC World and the quality of their news coverage. I mention these current affairs programs because I believe that the British provide quality content. They also inform, educate and entertain us. That is their purpose. In a healthy media environment the…
For several weeks or even months I was afraid that the EU Referendum, BREXIT, would result in a bad outcome. On Thursday the British people went to vote. On Thursday night I was watching. When I saw Gibraltar vote to stay in the EU I relaxed enough to manage sleep. On Friday Morning British people around the world woke up to the news that our nation had voted to leave the European Union. Some people were shocked and never expected it…
Flowing Water – A visual experiment is a simple one minute video. The first images were filmed at the Arboretum in the Jura and the timelapses show clouds playing above the Jura near La Dôle. La Dôle is where the doppler radar is located. That radar shows rainfall and precipitation so that air traffic controllers can advise pilots of weather conditions. With the amount of rain that has fallen over the last six or more weeks every river is full…
The good weather is finally back. I took this opportunity to go out and film around La Rippe which is on the border between France and Switzerland. From here you can see the Mont Blanc and the Jura. If you look to the South West you can see Geneva’s Jet D’eau and the Salève. I found the first location’s vantage point when I had a day off from work. I don’t remember where I was cycling or driving the scooter…
As of the 21st of June, the longest day, the day that Switzerland finally got some sunshine Instagram announced that there are half a billion instagrammers. That’s almost the same number of people who live in the European Union. Half a Billion users are sharing square images of their daily life. A photo posted by David Azia (@d_azia) on May 7, 2016 at 3:20am PDT Instagram provides us with windows in to the lives of others. A photo posted by Alexandra…
Time-lapse videos are fun because we can see something happen faster or slower than real time. By watching this content we gain a better understanding of the world and how it works. For years I have been filming time-lapses and the results can be fun. In some cases we record time-lapses with video cameras and at other times we set an interval timer to take pictures every so many seconds. In this post you will be watching clouds form as…
Yesterday I went for a 360 timelapse walk through the woods above Trelex. I set the camera to take an image every 8 seconds. As the woods were dark and dense it took some effort not to walk in too much mud and not to slip too many times. The result of the timelapse is not as good as I had hoped. Ideally I want to find a way to fix the camera so that it looks at my direction of travel….