Day 181 – Why watercolour?

Here’s another image from the weekend away. We went ziplining.

Obviously, I took the camera along, and I did most of the photography. But when I wanted to be in the photograph, I handed it to one of our guides. And – really just to make it easy for him – I popped it onto Intelligent Auto mode. Literally all the guy had to do was press the shutter button.

What the guy actually did was turn the dial to “Watercolour Effect” mode. That’s something my camera has, but that I have never used. Why would you?
But the ziplining guy has used it. And here’s what he got with it:

Don’t we look great? In… er… faux watercolour.

All he had to do was press the button. What he did was turn the dial.

Fortunately, as soon as I got the camera back, I put the dial back onto Sport mode. But this was an automatic thing in the midst of hanging off cables and traversing kloofs above Ceres, so I didn’t really think about it until afterwards. By which time it was too late.

This was last Saturday, but it’s nice to know that if we’d have gone zip-lining during the Renaissance, this is probably what it would have looked like.

Day 169 – New camera

Not a fancy Canon or Sony or whatever. Just the lens and sensor from my Mavic drone.

Well, I say “just”, but it’s quite a big thing for me to get it replaced.

I think I might have mentioned on here that there was a bit of an issue with the old one: there seemed to be some delamination under the front lens cover and that made the images smeary and yellow. It was evident in the top image that I shared on this post – despite my best efforts with the editing software.

The photo was taken at the beginning of the year and gradually, the problem got worse until I had two choices: stop taking photos with my drone or buy a new drone.

Actually, I was forced into the first one – the distortion and discolouration became too much to overcome with Lightroom. I mean – just look at this:

Ugh.

And I seriously considered the second choice as well; but then the virus happened and – having a bit of extra time on my hands – I looked at the price of a new drone.

Wow. Ouch. Eina. Lawd!

And while the new drones have a few extra features here and there and yes, they are HIGHLY desirable, in all honesty there was only one issue with my current drone. So instead, I looked into getting a camera replacement done. It seemed possible, but no-one was at work at any of the repair places during lockdown because they’re not classed as “essential services”.

Unless of course you want your drone camera replaced.
In which case they are quite literally the dictionary definition of “essential”.

Fast forward to this week and I finally bit the bullet and got round to taking Florence to Fixology in Sea Point, who sorted it within an hour while I walked on the Promenade:

Yes, rather expensive (the camera replacement, not the wander on the Prom), but not outrageous and better than having an otherwise lovely piece of precision technology sitting on your desk doing nothing.

Anyway, it was a bit breezy last night, but I did have a low level test flight around the garden and the images from the camera look spot on (as they should).

With plans for the next couple of weekends, I’m rejuvenated and looking forward to getting some decent footage and images of activities and landscapes.

Watch this space.

Heave

I’ve been regularly hanging around my Flickr account for a little while recently, for reasons which will become clear real soon now. The downside of this is the massive lack of any sort of productivity, but there’s a upside as well: old photos.

Like this one.

That would be my daughter (in the pink), pulling a huge length of washed up kelp (brown, becoming black, straggly holdfast stage-right) across Suiderstrand beach. And thanks to the magic of EXIF (Exchangeable image file format), I can tell you to the nearest second when this photo was taken:

This would then be a week or so before Little Miss Pink’s 6th birthday, and I think we can all agree that that’s a lot of seaweed to be pulling around when you’re just five years old.

I can also see that this image was taken on the old PoS (point and shoot, people, be nice) Sony DSC-HX300 camera with its amazing 50x digital zoom (not used on this occasion) which according to this blog last from about September 2013 until September 2015. Lovely device, but I grew out of it rather quickly.

And it was still in use by my boy until I upgraded again earlier this year to my 80D and passed the 700D down the family line. Now it becomes one of those pieces of technology that isn’t worth selling, but that will be worth holding onto only for the sentimental value in a few decades time. Although looking at the recent hipster resurgence in SLR and film, maybe there’s actually more reason to pop it safely back into its box and into the attic.

I will wait, I will wait for you

And I will wait, I will wait for you…

So sang banjo enthusiasts and all round folk rockers, Mumford and Sons.

Now, I’m no fan of Marcus Mumford and his merry band of men, but they hit the proverbial on the proverbial with this one. As did I in this post, because my Lily drone is now overdue.

This isn’t a surprise to me. They let me know, in a characteristically transparent email [I’ve PDF’d it here] which they sent before Christmas. My Lily is now due sometime in Summer 2016 (the Northern Hemisphere version thereof, of course).

We’re still ironing out logistics for our new shipping timeline. We expect to fulfil all of our pre-orders in the Summer 2016. Details will be shared as soon as they are available. We promise 🙂

The open-ended nature of that “Summer 2016” promise is mildly concerning, but hey, we’ll get there.

What is disappointing is that between the previously promised shipping date and this new one, I’m doing two overseas trips – one a once-in-a-lifetime one, including some prime Lily-playing territory – and I’m rather sad to be missing that opportunity.

Sognefjord_norway1

The crew at Lily continue to stay in touch just about weekly, informing me of latest developments, test results and new staff. I still believe that this is going to happen (although some on Facebook are more dubious) – I just wish it had happened already.

On Lily

(Thankfully) before the Rand went really bad, I ordered a Lily. Not the flower of death, but the super cool drone which follows you around like a beagle expecting a snack. The waiting time before shipping was 9 months, presumably because they needed orders to make money to make drones. But they promised that they would keep in touch during the process and, I have to say, they have. I get an update about every two or three weeks on average. Sometimes they introduce new members of staff, sometimes they tell me about some robotics conference they have been to, and sometimes the updates are rather more technical.

Here’s a sample from the one that arrived last night, all about a pre-production take off, landing and camera test.

As you can see in this footage, there are three image quality issues: fisheye distortion, wobble, and stabilization. The team is on it, addressing each issue as follows:

  • The current dampening and wiring cause internal vibrations, resulting in wobble. We are adjusting the durometer of the vibration dampening system and re-assembling the wires to ensure this wobble is removed.

  • The unbalanced fisheye distortion is caused by a mistuning of the external polycarbonate lens. We have already re-tuned the external lens and this issue will not appear on the production version.

  • Our electronic stabilization software (EIS) was not used in this video. We will be porting this piece to the unit in the coming days and expect much better performance. More on that soon. That’s all for now!

So glad that they are adjusting the durometer of the vibration dampening system. Heaven only knows why the durometer of the vibration dampening system was unadjusted in the first place. Rookie error, guys. Even I know to adjust the durometer of the vibration dampening system before I do pre-production tests. (I would also probably have mistuned the external polycarbonate lens though. That’s always a tough one to remember.)

The Lily people say that they are still on schedule to ship in February, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there are a couple of delays. We’ll see. The thing is, the communication process has been so open and transparent, that I think I would be rather understanding if things were to run a bit late. And there’s a lesson for a lot of companies in there.