I’m going through my back-catalogue of movie clips from previous vacations and trying to make some small movies out of it. The first one is from our awesome helicopter ride in New Zealand around the Franz Josef glacier.
The music is “like it” from sapiens fx.
New Zealand Helicopter Ride! from Jon Rocatis on Vimeo.
Just got back from a nice vacation in Vancouver/British Columbia/Seattle! This was my first vacation since I got CHDK installed on my pocket camera so it was time to experiment with some time lapse photography!
I got quite a lot of footage from various places and since I turned down the jpeg quality to the absolute minimum to get more shots on my 2GB SD card I even had the battery die before the card was full some times. I need to look into making some kind of external battery hack.
Anyway, just finished editing the best sequences in Final Cut Express and uploaded it to Vimeo.
British Columbia 2009 from Jon Rocatis on Vimeo.
The sound is garbled in a couple of places – quite weird. It is not on the source material but it seems that it happens in FCE when it converts from mp3. Must investigate.. Update: I tried converting the mp3 to wav using VLC (QuickTime will do as well) and then using that in FCE. That solved it! Maybe FCE doesn’t like VBR mp3’s or something.
The music is by HiFi Hustlers btw.
Some time ago when browsing the web I came across some news about the Space Shuttle. NASA had decided to retire it at around the year 2010! This was a bit of a shock to me and I began thinking about experiencing a launch live. I mentioned this to some of my colleagues and to my surprise they were all ready to go! In the end only Martin and Andreas were able to go – but that made planning a little easier too…
Getting the launch tickets was pretty intense as they sell out quickly. So the first countdown we experienced was the countdown for opening of the ticket sales! I was refreshing the ticket site URL pretty often until they finally started the sale. Then it was a race to enter the required information.. typing away like crazy.. done.. clicking “next”.. Arg! Forgot to click “I have read and understand bla. bla.”. Back.. clicking the checkbox.. “next”.. Arg! My credit card had changed from Visa to a Discover card! Back.. changing credit card type… “next”. Finally! The order went through and the confirmation mail appeared in my inbox! Phew!
We visited the Kenendy Space Center 2 days before launch to check things out. They had a “Up Close”-tour which we wanted to go to but they apparently sell out quickly so we had to get tickets for the next day. And the next day again was launch day so we ended up going to KSC 3 days in a row.
But it was all worth it. Seeing the Shuttle up close on the launch pad was really cool and it was a nice thing to do before seeing it launch.
At launch day we arrived at KSC pretty early as we didn’t want to take any chances with heavy traffic or things like that. The amount of people there surprised me! There were more people that evening than we had seen the previous days – and that was during the weekend! We killed some time taking pictures in the Rocket Garden where they illuminate the rockets at night.
I think we started to get in line for the busses that would take us to the launch viewing site around 23:00 or something. There were really long lines there, but we finally entered a bus and arrived at the NASA causeway around 01:15 – about an hour before liftoff. Then it was camera gear setup time! I brought my trusty old 300D for one purpose only: doing a long exposure of the launch. Setting it up using a gorillapod was pretty difficult – the camera was sitting all the way down on the ground and with everything around the being black it was really hard getting reference points.
With all camera setup done I could finally just relax and enjoy the countdown..
Unfortunately clouds had moved in over the area during the night – and they were thick clouds as well. So the Shuttle vanished out of sight fairly quickly after launch. That was pretty disappointing of course but at around the same time I realised that we weren’t going to see it again the sound reached us. Then the disappointment immediately went away! First you hear the rumble of the main engines followed by the awesome crackling sound of the twin solid rocket boosters. That is impressive to say the least. Even though we were around 9.5 kilometers away you can still feel the sound!
“Roger roll, Endeavour…”
Above is my long exposure attempt. The horizon is a little crooked and I should have had a little more ground in the picture. But I was afraid that I couldn’t fit the entire arc in the frame – that turned out to be a non-issue..
Even with the disappointing clouds it was still an awesome experience and something that I will never forget.
The cool thing about rocket launches is that they aren’t designed to be bright like the sun or to make as much noise as possible – that is simply a by-product of what it takes to go into space! That is all kinds of awesome! To quote one of Andreas’ T-shirts: “Science works, bitches!” 
See more launch pictures here!
I finally got around to process all of my pictures and gps logs for my latest Japan trip. We visited Tokyo, Osaka, Himeji, Kyoto, Hiroshima and a small onsen resort up north called Ikaho – it was near Shibukawa station.
It was only 7 months since my first trip there but Japan was just as cool and fun as the first time!
