I was in Spain with the Ricoh Theta S last week so I took the opportunity to experiment with the Ricoh Theta S in a number of locations. What I like about such a device is that it takes a click to get pictures. I experimented with a manfrotto monopod and a smaller monopod. The Manfrotto base was clearly visible in shots so the immersive experience is degraded. With the smaller monopod the base is the same width as that of the camera. This means that at least the support was hidden.
The first image was taken at Denia port, showing two runners running along the port wall/promenade. You can look around and see that the sea was flat, that the car park is relatively full and buildings behind the scene. It provides you with context.
The second image is taken with the monopod fully extended so that it is among the branches of the trees. You can see a light house ahead and you can look at the tree at the same time.
It would be interesting to experiment with archeology and 360 pictures and video. Instead of placing the camera to one side and having the camera operator choose what you see the action could take place around the camera and the viewer, sitting in a swivel chair could turn and look at where the most interesting thing is happening next. You can zoom in and out within reason, to see details or to see a wider picture.
At the Denia Marina part of a bar is floating on the water. it has a sphere of sun shades around with speakers and lights. You can sit in comfortable seats and look up. A conventional image would show the dome from outside but with a spherical camera you can capture the feeling of being in the centre of the structure.
This image was taken in Basel during a recent trip. This location is ideal for 360/spherical images because each wall is covered with paintings, the clock is decorated and more. As it surrounds you the subject lends itself well to 360° photography.
For the last image I went to sea level and photographed the view from a headland and beaches on either side. One of those beaches has bars and a number of people whereas the other beach is nice and quiet. It is nice to look at these images and get a feel for the place.
The challenge in taking these photos is how to get the camera in to an interesting place and hide yourself or the support for the camera. I usually knelt down and tried to stay directly below the camera. The other option is to find a system to stand the camera at the right height but make the monopod invisible. With multi-camera setups parallax makes hiding tripods and other objects easier. The next step is to find a base that makes hiding the stand simple.
Over the last two days, I have been playing with Infomaniak K Drive, Swisscom MyCloud, Apple iCloud and Google Drive. I settled for Swisscom Mycloud because backing up pictures is free with my current contract and it’s cheaper than two terabytes with Apple iCloud. It’s free.
Infomaniak K drive is interesting because you can back up images automatically but when you have over ten thousand images on your phone like I do it cannot work through the backlog without timing out. The only way for me to update would be to keep the app alive for several hours as it uploads images and videos.
Swisscom Mycloud has the same issue but I invested yesterday getting all the images to upload from my phone. With patience, I might be able to upload all the videos but this may take several weeks. Both services have the flaw that when the app goes to sleep they stop uploading, and as video files are large it takes more time to determine which files still need to upload than to start uploading again.
Flickr also has this issue but as Flickr raises their yearly fees every year, and makes downloading files a messy and painful experience I am happy to find alternatives.
Both iCloud and Google Photos do not have this issue either because I’ve been synching as I go along or because they have the right privileges to work through the backlog.
Infomaniak K Drive is around 65 CHF per year, Google Drive and iCloud are around 100 to 120 CHF per year.
With Swisscom Mycloud I have “free” unlimited storage for photos and videos as well as 250 gigabytes for online backup of other files. I can then look at these photos via Swisscom TV, not that I do.
Swisscom Mycloud could be made more interesting by adding duplicate detection as well as the ability to upload from two or three devices at once.
Features I would like
Duplicate detection, so that I could upload images from several sources at once
Multidevice support, so that I can upload from the desktop, the phone, and other devices.
Background uploading, when on WiFi. Video files are heavy and the app times out on iOS devices before the upload is complete.
Select by day, because pictures from one day may be of a specific event. When you have more than five images selecting images individually takes too much time.
360 image and video support. Content on my phone is of spherical images and videos
Features I like
Placing images on a map. It’s fun to look for images by location. As you zoom in you can see everywhere you’ve taken pictures. This uses Exif data rather than location information based on where your phone has been, as with Google Maps.
Unlimited free storage of images and video. Since mobile phones aggregate pictures and videos from 360 devices, cameras, and other gadgets it’s nice to have as much data as we need for the storage of these images. It gives us an offsite backup in case we lose or break our phones.
It’s fast. Uploading new images is fast. Within seconds of taking a picture, it is backed up. Accessing images is also fast.
Smooth Integration With Swisscom TV. As soon as images are uploaded to Mycloud they can be viewed via Swisscom TV on the screen of your choice. This is interesting for videos and images that are worth seeing on a big screen.
Easy sharing of images and image folders. I like how easy it is to share images and folders and to allow other people to add images. What I would like to see on top of this is the ability to allow specific people to see the content. It would be nice to restrict access to chosen phone numbers, e-mail addresses and more. I would also like to password protect folders as I am not comfortable sharing certain images openly.
Select All and download, Should you desire to download all images at once this is possible. Select one image, then choose “select all”, press “download” and theoretically, you will be able to download all images at once. I say theoretically because I selected over 10,000 files which included videos and photographs. Google Drive is limited to 500 images per zip file and when I tried downloading from Flickr I found the process clunky and messy. Flickr strips all EXIF data so you’re left with a mess of images. (A media asset manager’s nightmare because of the volume of work, but a dream, because of the hours of work) 😉
Why The Interest?
iPhones, iPads and Android devices now have 120 or more gigabytes of storage each and with this amount of data, it is easy to reach the 200-gigabyte wall beyond which you pay ten CHF per month for storage. A “free” option like Swisscom MyCloud Standard is interesting for those on the right contracts because it’s free. This means that no matter how much storage their phone has their images are backed up. It also means that as time advances and they gather more and more images it can expand.
Apple and iPhoto want you to believe that they are the best integrated, slickest option. When you’re in a situation like this they say “You have 30 days to download your photos in the photo app”. There is no “select all and download” option. There also seems to be a limit of how much bandwidth you can use in a single day.
And Finally
The reason for which MyCloud, Google Photos, and other solutions are so interesting is that we have moved to a laptop-based workflow and as a result, the hard drive on our laptop is as big as the one on our phone so backing images up locally requires an external hard drive.
I had Firewire 400, 800 USB 2, 3 and USB C drives. Apple loves to de-standardise ports and so hard drives that were once convenient to use become problematic. With increasing bandwidth and online storage solutions we can stop worrying about external hard drives on a daily basis and use them when we need to “desaturate our drives”. I apologise for the diving term.
With online storage, we’re backing up when we’re hiking, cycling, climbing, doing via Ferrata, traveling and more. We don’t need to worry about our box of cables, adaptors, or which drive what material is stored. As a media asset manager, I can help you consolidate your media assets into a single location, along with backup solutions.
I hope that this blog post helps you understand this topic and provides you with solutions.
Over the last three or four days I have marked two books as finished despite not finishing for a simple reason. I have plenty of books on Kindle, Audible and Kobo that I need to read, but that to read all these books, would take time. I started to read one book and I stopped within pages, every time for the same reason.
In today’s context my disgust with one book is rational. For decades the web and social media have been treated as addictions, and because they have been stigmatised and seen as illnesses it becomes morally acceptable to abuse users. Look at Meta Facebook and Meta Instagram, and how they are being discussed in the news. The attitude, that social media is a drug enabled marketers, and social media owners to abuse of their addicted users, because they’re addicts, and it is their fault for becoming addicted.
That book that was written years in the past, illustrates why I was bothered by the framing of the discussion at the time, and we see the repercussions of that attitude a decade on. Words, and attitudes, matter. Social media should be treated as a means of communicating like any other. Genuine interactions between people should be encouraged. Instead the opposite is true. Four years ago I was using my real name, and meeting people in person, from social media. Today I am anonymous, because I do not trust the social media landscape that has resulted from being given over to marketers, algorithms, and groups that manufacture consent.
And now to the second book. The second book I gave up on is about someone thru hiking during the pandemic last year, and for the first few chapters I found the book, mediocre, but I continued reading it. I stopped reading it when I saw the political bias.
What I wanted, when I started reading a book about hiking during a pandemic, was to read about how the person gathered what information they could, about the virus, from reliable, not opinionated sources, for example the World Health Organisation, medical groups and more. I would have found it interesting if the person had discussed masks, doubts about continuing and striving to find reliable information.
The Beauty of Kindle Unlimited, Audible and Libraries
If we had to read and finish every book we borrowed or bought then we would be paralised by fear, and we may start reading a book, dislike it, and give up on reading forever. Thanks to libraries. Kindle Unlimited and Audible we can take as many books as we want, within reasonable limits, begin to read, and when our interests shift, start reading something else, and then something else.
We see television, film, music and other pursuits as though we can consume several programs a day. The same is true of podcasts. For some reason we live under the illusion that we must read one book at a time, but that is a false assumption. Look at schools at universities. We do not study one topic at a time. We study several in paralel. The same should be true of how we read.
We should start reading a book about topic a, and after a while start reading about topic b, before continuing with topic E. Books can, and should be read in paralel because by reading books in paralel the knowledge we gain from one book complements the knowledge we gain from another book.
I find that when I read fiction I can read through books at a quick pace, but that when I read factual books I sometimes need to read them over a period of months, or even years. They are filled with information, and sometimes that information is digestible in small parts, rather than all at once. If we read the entire book at once, we will remember less, than over time.
Now back to the core. When I lived in London I used to love spending hours in Waterstone’s looking at the bookshelves and I dreamt of having thousands of francs/pounds to spend on books but I didn’t. In university I used to love going to the library and pick up documentaries, and books, and watch them, or skim through the books. To buy every book that peaks our curiousity is expensive, so we feel that we should read and finish every book. If we can walk from village to village, and look for books that wake our curiousity, then that is great. If we were not in the middle of a pandemic then I would have picked up and started reading those books immediately, but as we can’t be as relaxed about handling books I prefer to read them on a sittee, than in bed.
If I had known about all these lending libraries then I would have taken books and dropped them off, years ago. I intend to put these books back in circulation. I could read them, take notes, and write blog posts about them, and conclude with where I dropped off the book, for the next reader.
In Borex they have something like that. Fnac, and the Borex lending library have “coup de coeur”, where people can leave a note about why they loved a book, and why others should read it. I could review books that I acquire via lending libraries.
It would benefit writers, readers and villages, with an afflux of “book tourists.” 😉
I am against travel during a pandemic. I am against venturing further than a two hour walk. To be more accurate I was against these things until the vaccines. My attitude since then has changed because of the indifference and incompetence governments have shown. Instead of having a primary and a backup safety measure they have gone for a primary, with no backup solution.
Switzerland and other nations behaved as if vaccinations, by themselves, without masks, without social distancing, without any other mitigating measures, were enough. Now we’re in the fifth wave and all age groups are vulnerable, from young children to older people. The entire social column is at risk at the moment.
Someone used the refrain “but some people can’t self isolate, they have a family, they have children, they have work, and other excuses. We are in a pandemic. People should be giving reasons for why they want to be safe, rather than make excuses for doing something that is unsafe, from meeting friends for fun, in a bar, without masks, to sitting on a train and eating crisps, to going for a walk without observing the recommended safety distance.
Now that winter is back, and that people socialise indoors the virus is converging from group to group with ease. People are so busy making excuses as to why this group of people have no choice, that group has choice, and this profession has no choice, that the safety measures that were in place have disintegrated. In the process of excusing each other for not respecting masks, social distance, and waning vaccine effectiveness barriers are no longer in place. That’s why we have rapid increases in the number of cases.
Defeatism is making the pandemic flare up at moments, and is preventing it from being eradicated. Without defeatism the pandemic could have been over last August.
The reason I have changed my mind about travel during a pandemic, is that at the current rate it will take years for the pandemic to end. If people are actively trying to stop the spread of the virus, if they are holding each other accountable, then it makes sense to forego certain freedoms. In the current situation the opposite is true. Passionate self-isolation, masking and vaccination boosters make sense, but staying within two hours of home doesn’t.
I am not speaking of going to bars, meeting big groups, or taking over absurd risks, I am speaking about walking in open spaces that are slightly different, of seeing another landscape, and of going to a zone with a lower risk of contamination.
Imagine if Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett created a character named Pandemic, or Covid-19. We will see if a surrealist creates such a character.
Autumn, not winter, is coming. A week or two ago I noticed that a tree was changing from Green to red, as the leaves began to turn from Spring and Summer mode to Autumn and Winter mode. I noticed that the trees as you enter and leave Cheserex are also beginning to turn read.
Changing Trees
As if that wasn’t enough the leaves are also turning on the Jura. It is turning from green to orange, and red, and one or two other colours I didn’t pay attention to. As I cycled from around Haute-Morges to Pampigny I noticed that, there too, the leaves were turning. Not only were they turning but they were falling from the trees. The season of death is returning.
Leaves Are Turning Too Early
Last year, as well as this year, the leaves are changing too soon. They’re changing before they’re meant to, due to the drought. Some trees drop their leaves in anticipation of hardship but others drop them as a result of hardship, so when we see leaves drop their leaves so soon, we know that they are under duress due to the changing climate and weather systems. Now would be a good time to walk by forests, to observe the change, and fly drones, to get an aerial view.
Mud and Dogs
Now that the air temperature has dropped the scary dogs are back on their walks. So is the mud. I loved walking during the heatwave because I was often the only person walking. Dog owners couldn’t walk, because dogs would get heat stroke, and normal people didn’t walk, because they would get heat stroke. I could enjoy my walks in the peace and quiet.
Now that the temperatures have dropped, so dog walkers have resumed their walks. Now I can either overcome my fear of dogs on every single walk, or I could get a gym membership and stay indoors and work on recovering the strenght I have lost over the last five years.
I have a deep hatred for dog walkers. A few days ago I came across someone walking a bunch of dogs and I went down the gap between two fields, rather than walk by dogs. The problem, with fearing dogs, is that dogs know, and want to attack. At the start of summer I was charged, and it traumatised me for two or three weeks. It didn’t bite, but I was convinced that it would bite me. I froze, and luckily it changed its mind.
The damage is done. I already had a fear of dogs. That experience cemented it. This morning I retrieved the walking sticks from the car. I’m considering walking with them as shields, in case of such an encounter over the next few months, when the weather is cold enough for dogs to terrify those of us who are afraid of dogs.
Apathetic Dog Walkers
The issue is that dog walkers are apathetic towards people who fear their pets. They have leashes that are ten metres long, or the dogs are unleashed. If you’re afraid of dogs you’re trapped. Either you overcome your fear or you walk along roads where dog walkers will not walk, with their beloved terrors.
If dog walkers recognised that we are afraid of dogs, and got them under control, then I would feel happier walking by dogs. When I was attacked, the woman just watched. She did nothing to control the dog, until it was charging. If I had run it would have mauled me. If I had not been afraid it would have done nothing. If the owner had controlled the dog I would not have been filled with fear, that was justified, in the end.
Lost Freedom
Now that dog walkers are out in force I will revert to my walks along roads, where dog walkers keep their dogs under close supervision.
Indoor Training or Cycling
Two options do exist. Indoor training, and cycling. The advantage of cycling is that it’s cheap but the bike will get dirty and I will get cold.
The other option is to go to an indoor gym for the first time in years, and resume indoor training. If I went into a gym I would wear a mask. I like the idea of going to an indoor gym but I would wear a mask. Autumn is just arriving, so I have time to consider the situation.
And Finally
Two days ago I walked an extra four kilometres to avoid dog walkers. Instead of walking an 8km loop I walked 12km. I saw a car, with a dog cage, so rather than walk, and be subjected to my fear of dogs, I enjoyed a longer walk, along paths that I walked along for years, years ago.
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Made a 360 degrees portrait page on facebook
https://www.facebook.com/Portrait360-112660985877101/
amazing little camera