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Preparations for our climbing holiday in France continue apace!
When we started climbing outdoors a couple of years ago, we quickly discovered the value of documenting our adventures with video and photographs. It adds a new dimension to a day's escapades when you can sit and relive the day in the evening...it always sparks memories and conversations that you couldn't have at the time, because you were at opposite ends of a rope or whatever.
At the end of our first year, we were able to produce a lovely photobook documenting our journey from outright noobs to not quite such outright noobs. It's a lovely way to distil 2,000 photo's into something interesting and meaningful.
And of course we made a couple of cool videos of our trip to Fontainebleau last September.
To be honest, I would have made more (and intended to), but it is very time consuming and let's face it, nobody else is really that interested.
It's also really incredible how ubiquitous high quality video cameras have become, even just over the last year.
In September 2013, in Font, we had one decent smartphone that would take HD video, one half decent smartphone that took reasonable quality lower-res video, and one purpose built video camera that claimed to be 720p but was really atrocious quality.
We had one little tripod that fell over as soon as you tried to attach anything heavier than a lighter to it, and one of those spider wire things that you can fashion into a shape that can hold a phone whilst it video's, but are really hard to fix into an unmoving position, and even harder to get to point specifically where you want it to.
The result of all that was a lot of faffing about trying to balance phones and cameras on rocks and uneven ground, and a lot of badly framed, poor quality video.
By contrast, this year we will have at least 5 smartphones capable of producing 720p video, two of which can take 1080p, and one of which even claims to take video in 4K!
Alongside those, we'll have two very good DSLR cameras, both of which will take HD Video, and at least one GoPro type action camera, which again takes extremely good video.
So I've gathered this collection of tripods to assist our documentation...
The yellow one has extendible legs, up to about 1m, and is quite sturdy. We already owned this, so I just got a phone holder attachment for under a tenner.
The one with the fat black legs is bendy and robust. The legs can be bent to suit uneven ground, or even wrapped around branches of trees or similar. That cost just over a tenner.
Finally, the monopod (purchased for the princely sum of £3.39) is a phone clamp on the end of an extendible arm. This will have a variety of uses, from taking selfies from much further away, to filming climbers from above, to who knows what interesting motion shots!
To store the huge amount data we're going to create, I've got about half a dozen 32GB micro-SD cards for the phones, and a 32GB SDHC card for the camera. I assume Jezz will have significant capacity for his 3 or more cameras too.
I've just realised I'm probably going to have to take a good sized hard drive to store the ridiculous amount of video we're going to end up taking!
Fortunately we're all into photography, and we all have a different approach. With a bit of luck, we should get some really interesting and creative stills and movies.
Interesting to us, anyway.
You'll all be getting samples of it on this blog, of course...
You can't escape it...resistance is futile!
B-)
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