I ate lunch as I watched the footage of a drone flying over Hong Kong at night and at first I was confused as to whether the images were real or not. As you watch more of the video you see that everything is real. The depth of field is good and so is the exposure. There is no or very little noise from this being shot at night.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYO1uk7vIcc
You see buildings, cars, traffic and more. You see things from above, others from the side and yet more from eye level. There is an interesting flight by an office building where we can look into the lit offices.
Another beautiful shot is the shot of the shipping containers that are on a shipping container as it sails. There are plenty of shots in this video to show that you can give time for images to breath. People will enjoy watching this video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e10pVhxNOco
There are some atmospheric shots of Budapest. We begin with a drone flying over a tram as it makes its way across a bridge. We then see the city and a variety of landmarks and more. It’s an interesting video to watch in 4K.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKaVhXn49xY
A timelapse from the top of an ice breaker as it breaks through the ice is familiar. Less familiar is the moment when two ships are next to each other. Even less familiar is when The Icebreaker attaches itself to the stuck ship and pulls it back to freedom. It’s a scene that is unfamiliar to many of us.
I was going to take the scooter but it was stuck by three SUVs so I had no option but to lazily give up and go on a 10 kilometre Sunday Ingress walk. I couldn’t be bothered running up to the second floor, getting the car keys, moving the car, getting the scooter out and then moving the car back. This is especially true since it’s going to rain tomorrow.
I do have the goal of having at least one day a week without using an internal combustion engine so by the neighbours each having jeeps/SUVs I reduced my own carbon footprint. Days without internal combustion are always good.
Ingress Screengrab of missions.
My goal was to complete the Nyon by night set of missions. It’s the top line in the screengrab above. It’s a quick set of missions to complete with just a hack but portal for six portals. As the servers were not acting up or slow the time it took to do the walk was enough to complete the six missions. In the process, I captured a few portals and established a few more fields over the city.
While on this walk I listened to the You’re Dead to Me podcast by the BBC. It’s a podcast that explores history in a light-hearted manner. It has a comedian, an expert on the topic of the episode and the presenter. In the episode I listened to they were discussing Harriet Tubman, It’s the little brother of the In Our Time Podcast.
When I was playing Ingress a few years ago I didn’t track the walk with a GPS. I tracked it for this walk. You see that rather than be a large circular hike without overlaps you have the opposite. You see that I walked over certain streets in Nyon two or three times. You also see that there are thorns where I walk to the right or left of my course to get a portal or other.
It’s especially around the Centre of Nyon that you see that I walk through many more streets than usual. On a normal walk, I’d walk from A to B choosing the most direct route. In this case, I go up and down certain streets two or three times.
If you do this without trying to complete a mission it will be even more chaotic as you walk from portal to portal to hack, capture, up, field or other.
During the lull between summer sports and winter sports Ingress is a good way for some people to get out and be physically active without necessarily driving for hours.
Today I went for an Ingress Photo Walk before the rain and I eventually did have to go home because the phone was starting to get wet and there was no urgency to continue playing the game and walking.
I did spot a few things that were slightly out of the ordinary. The first thing was the mushroom beneath. I have spotted a few of these but this one did not have a bite taken out of it. They’re large and flat and you can see the corrugation, or whatever the correct term is, beneath. They have had enough moisture to grow over the last few days.
Mushroom with the Alps in the background
The next unusual site was this burned-out house. It appears to be fresh. I could see a ladder going to the first-floor window.
Burnt out house
The next unusual sighting was fountains with the sign “fountain stopped due to lack of water. You don’t often see this type of sign but due to the lack of rain of this summer, this might not be surprising. It might also be due to a lot of water being used to extinguish the fire, but I have not checked.
Fountain without water due to lack of water
The final and most interesting sight is this one. It takes us back in time to when rural meant agricultural. We see nice wooden doors, aged with time and reflecting a different age. We also see plenty of fresh firewood above as well as the small boxes below. I don’t know whether these were for charcoal or tools.
Without Ingress, I have cycled, walked and driven through this village plenty of times without exploring the small side streets. This time I did and I spotted some unusual sights. What is also of interest is that despite this village being quite small it has a lot of portals.
Initially, I thought of posting these pictures to Instagram but chose not too because I’d rather provide you with the images and their context. We need to go back to writing blog posts and sharing content from our own websites.
Cloud timelapses are fun when you can put the camera somewhere and go and do something else. Yesterday I knew that we would go from blue skies and sparse clouds to overcast and rainy so I set up the camera to record a timelapse. I set the interval to one setting and the number of frames to one. You see the rain clouds form and then the rain starts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQPB9pQGN9A
This timelapse was recorded over 220 minutes or more. It took a full charge of one of the long duration batteries. I could have plugged the camera and used power straight from the wall but sometimes it’s good to cycle batteries.
I really wanted the rain to fall so heavily that it would be impossible to see through the window at the end of the timelapse. That would have made for a nice conclusion.
After watching the video below this paragraph I want to speak on the pleasure of walking without stopping at a road crossing. In modern cities you can’t walk for more than a minute or two without having to stop at a road crossing, a traffic light or other feature. The result is that a stroll or walk is filled with stops and starts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVJ_rgEUSJE
As people move towards urbanised centres, and as more and more people live vertically, on top of each other so the need for gyms, swimming pools, indoor climbing centres and other features become essential. This is because we are designed by evolution for sports. Moving towards urban centres detracts from our ability to do sports in a natural environment.
When I lived in London (North West, Zone four, so not really London ;-)) I would walk 45 minutes each way to university and back because I hated the idea of waiting for the bus. When I went into central London I walk often walk for an hour and a half or more. With time I got to know the city very well.
The same is true of Rome. When you don’t know a city you use public transport to get you close to places and walk the rest of the way. After several days in a city you get to connect every monument or landmark from every other. Getting everywhere by foot becomes simplified and the bus and underground trains become obsolete.
If you go cycling or walking in the countryside you get to know the landscape just as well but there are fewer cars, people and obligations to stop. In the countryside you stop not because a traffic light is red or because you don’t want to run over but because you want to capture an image of the landscape. It may be a field, or flowers, or horses galloping across a field. That last one is less common.
The other drawback to urbanisation is that flying drones, planes, helicopters and other fun devices is no longer possible. To fly a drone or other flying object you need to be far from people, far from power lines, from animals that could be scared and away from flight plans. With all of those restrictions, the freedom to fly a drone is negated.
It is not rare for me to do a timelapse from La Barillette. Several years ago I tried a timelapse with a 360 camera where you saw clouds forming overhead and in a spherical video. I also filmed a timelapse of the Paléo parkings filling up. This time I went up the Jura in the hope of filming Autumn colours but as I got to the top my project changed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yPSUd2z434
The problem with filming Autumn colours is that you need to be there at the right time of day and with the light coming from the right direction. The light was coming from the wrong angle so stopping in the woods would have allowed me to get three or four frames before moving on to the next location.
When you’re in a car this type of filming is not interesting. It’s more interesting to get to one location and get a greater diversity of shots. The other advantage is that you can always head back down and get the shots you thought were still interesting.
As I looked from above and assessed the situation I saw that clouds were forming and dissipating. I thought that I may eventually find myself in a cloud with poor visibility. I was more interested in capturing the formation of clouds. They did form, but then they dissipated, and then they formed again but more sparsly before dissipating again.
This is fantastic when you’re filming time-lapses because the change is noticeable without being accelerated so you can imagine what it would give if you did speed it up.
The challenge with timelapse is knowing whether something will take minutes, hours, days or even longer to capture. I have one idea that I assess would take six or seven hours which I will not discuss at this stage.
Usually when I film timelapses I set the camera up so that it records one or two frames every so many seconds. In this case I just started recording. I did not know on what timescale the actions would occur so it gave me greater flexibility in post production.
The footage was sped up from 800 percent to 5000 percent. The clouds that were vanishing was fast. The river of clouds flowing down the valley was slower and thus sped up more. The other challenge is to decide how tight or wide you want the frame to be. With the trees and the river of clouds it’s hard to know whether to have a tighter shot where the action may render the frame boring sooner or wehter tom have a wide shot where the action only takes up half the screen.
In the end this is about gaining experience rather than getting things right first time. It’s about learning to see and anticipate how nature will behave. If you get it right then it can be of great beauty. If you get it wrong you ignore it and think of a new idea.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5AK3mmNMLg
Later in the year, when Autumn comes we can expect the clouds to behave like this. It’s the “Soupe de Pois” as some call it. I have at least two or three ideas to experiment with and two of them can be done from the comfort of home.
I did see something exceptional on the way back down. A herd of five chevreuils as I drove down afer I finished getting my timelapse footage. That’s the most I’ve seen at once when driving.
A century ago Dennis Arkadievitch Kaufmann, more commonly known as Dziga Vertov, the spinning top, came up with the concept of the All-Seeing Eye. The Kinoki. The Cinema Eye. His idea was that with time life unawares could be documented and daily life would be captured by cameras for everyone to see.
https://youtu.be/yzxrSX79oz4
Until recently the idea of filming and documenting everyone with video and photo cameras was an act of fiction. Rolls of films had only 36 frames and DV tapes only lasted 63 minutes. Cameras were dedicated devices that you did not have with you at all times and to take pictures was expensive and you needed space for storage.
If we were to take 36 pictures I think we would have paid 1.20 CHF per image recently. DV tapes were about 15 CHF per tape depending on how many you bought at once.
Today we have two or three cameras with us at all times with gigabytes of storage. With the iPhone we could easily take a thousand pictures in a day if we had a way of recharging the battery halfway through.
We also have the means to share these images. We have Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Whatsapp. We also have blogs. We could mention Flickr and SmugMug but they have angered those who loved their site to the point of losing their users.
When I was streaming live from Paléo a few years ago I was groundbreaking by using the phone and QIK or Bambuser.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTwDK863xJo
Manu Chao – Paléo 26 July 2008
Fast forward a few years and live streaming of music events has progressed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JiEtLmnUfXM
We have gone from cameras that were stuck on the ground and barely moved to FPV video cameras that fly and follow snowboarders as they jump and slide down mountain faces. The camera no longer needs to be on the ground to be steady and get good images. Without weight the Kinoki can see scenes like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5a5mRe60sE
These all-seeing eyes can also fly in the landscape and show us the world as only a wingsuit flyer could have seen it in the past. We can see the same things without risking our lives or devoting hours of training to get to the right level of competence.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyrq-qzOx1U
We then see Paris in the 1900s and now. We see how some things have stayed exactly the same and how other things have changed. The main difference is that in the 1900s it would have been a wooden camera with a wooden tripod and in modern days a carbon fibre tripod with a modern camera.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGQYFG4YHGw
There is also this footage of 1900s Paris in colour.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ue20LntcV2A
The All-Seeing Eye then takes us to 1911 New York and we see life with cars and people walking across a street. Sound was added later.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aohXOpKtns0
An old-style educational video of how hydraulic steering works.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDiOKqMKTO8
Compare to this modern documentary
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DL_mJeb6O04
When we jump forward a few decades we have this footage of 1960s London.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zk0eyKzp1c
Of course the diversity captured by the All Seeing Eye does not stop there. We often come across arts that are preserved by a single individual, which thanks to the all seeing eye, is preserved for future generations
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITzYSYi_rGE
When I was on one of my daily walks I expected that this would be a long written blog post about theories and reasoning but in the end it becomes a collection of videos to explore the diversity of topics that the “all-seeing eye” can capture. The topic is broad and this is just a tiny glimpse.
Linkedin Learning is a video resource for people who would like to learn new skills. These range from writing and painting to sound design, video lighting, project management and more. In following these courses individuals can learn new skills, perfect old ones, and learn new tricks. The point is always to move forward, whether you have five minutes or twenty seven and a half hours.
For people who are new to Linkedin Learning, you have the opportunity to watch short self-contained videos before committing to courses. These cover a range of subjects and range in duration from three minutes to half an hour or more. All course videos can be watched individually as you would YouTube videos if you wanted to refresh your knowledge of how to do something.
Courses
Courses such as The History of Film And Video Editing are made up of videos divided into two chapters The first chapter is about A History of Film Editing and the second part is about The Technology of film and Video editing. Such courses will complement your knowledge and understanding of a topic.
Learning Google Adsense is another example of a course. It covers “Understanding Adsense, Getting started with adsense, configuring ads and more. By studying for one and a half hours you will come away from this course with a good understanding of how Google Adsense works.
When you complete these video courses you get a certificate of completion which can be added to Linkedin Learning, and the relevant PDFs can be included when applying to jobs where these skills are relevant.
Learning pathways
The next step up from one and a half hour courses is the Learning Pathway. Learning Pathways are designed to encompass a variety of skills and knowledge that are required to work as professionals within certain industries or professions.
I recently completed my first Learning pathway: Become a Project Manager and the experience was good. I feel that I did come away from this course having learned about project management. I saw how it relates to projects I have also worked on but also how it could contribute to future projects. Video and television production go well with project management.
The advantage of such a course is that it covers such a breadth of courses that you come away with a deep understanding of the topic. If you want to push further you can take each exam and get the NASBA equivalent in the process. As I live in Europe I didn’t push that far as I don’t know whether it would be recognised.
I am happy to come away from the course with a collection of certificates but I wish they had provided a learning pathway to recognise the entirety of the course, to save on paperwork when applying for jobs.
Continuing Education Credits
Studying Linkedin Learning Courses will provide you with certificates, skills on your Linkedin Learning and new knowledge but it can also count as credit for a number of other certifications of which a few are listed above. I know that many of the units I completed also provide learning credit towards PMI related courses.
When I looked at courses in French I saw that the certifications were the same and this disappoints me. At this moment in time Linkedin Learning is centered on American learning and could benefit from international certifications. Swiss and French Learning bodies should design and produce courses that people can take in Europe and have recognised. In fact the European Union should work towards this.
Constant Learning
We live in an age of constant learning and reskilling and online learning courses are a good method by which to keep our skills, knowledge and understanding up to date. By Europe, the United States, Asia and Africa working on courses that we can study online people who are between contracts could be earning value affordably by following these courses. Learning is constant, and the more variety we have, the better it will be.
Ingress by bike is good when you’re in the countryside because it allows you to travel between villages faster than if you were walking and without the carbon footprint of taking the car or a scooter with an internal combustion engine. It also allows you to stop anywhere.
Distance Covered
In two hours I travelled about 30 km, which by ordinary cycling standards is slow. I like to cover that distance in about an hour and a half or less. I was able to cover at least six to eight villages and visit portals that I would not overwise visit.
New Portal Spotting
During the bike ride I noticed that there were some unmarked portal opportunities. I saw some “borne kilometrique” and border markers that were not listed. The border markers are old stone sculptures where you see VD on one side and FR on the other. In this context FR stands for France, not Fribourg. They’re spaced out regularly enough to be justified as portals.
Undulating Terrain
The landscape here isn’t flat so if you’re cycling to play Ingress you sometimes visit portals that are at the bottom of troughs or other hills. You also need to cycle upwards as much as you cycle downwards. As a result it does promote a healthy afternoon of physical exercise. When you sprint between portals you’re exerting yourself more than if you were looking down at your phone while walking.
Quadlock holder
if you’re playing ingress on a bike holding the phone in your hand is dangerous. That’s why it makes sense to use something like the quadlock bike mount. It’s easy to install on your bike and when you’re playing ingress you clip the phone on, and when you finish it you remove the phone in seconds.
In the past when I’ve played ingress I kept the phone in my pocket and I had to stop to see if I was close to the next portal or if I wanted to navigate. In this case you’re using the Ingress app rather than a cycling app and you spot the field lines and head towards the portal that you either want to capture or link from.
All in all this is a nice way of going for a bike ride somewhere familiar without getting bored by the routine or the 30th time down the same road. It’s a nice way of passing an afternoon.
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