Sunday, March 16, 2014

Winter again?


After some time with warm weather, the temperature being mostly above freezing, everyone was ready to embrace the spring, including me, after a miserable and mostly non-existent winter. However, this weekend the winter struck back. The change was visible in the weather forecast a few days earlier and we started to talk about a small overnighter this weekend. Not everybody could make it, but I, Toni and JJ decided to meet up at Marttila at 16:30 on Saturday. With the effect of the days getting longer now being very noticeable, we would have more than two hours of daylight before the sunset.

Thursday, March 13, 2014

A Winter Video

I dusted off my Panasonic GH2 and made a little video about the current winter, or whatever you would choose to call it.


I used the GH2 and the Panasonic 14-42 lens, as well as the Panasonic Summilux 25/1.4 for a few clips. A short clip was also made with the waterproof Panasonic FT4. I tried a new hack on the GH2. The Cluster X Moon T7 in HBR 25p mode didn't work reliably with my Sandisk Extreme 45 MB/s cards, but the Cluster X SpitzZ T6 worked well. These hacks almost triple the bitrate of the video data in the camera, and I think the result is visible when you are editing the video. There is more detail to be pulled from the shadows, something not entirely unusable when filming in high contrast sunny weather and it also helps to maintain the excellent resolution of this particular camera. This resolution makes it possible to do small pans and zooms in post, something which was not possible to do well with the earlier Canon 60D I had.

Unfortunately, this non-winter hasn't provided much inspiration for doing video work. Last winter I managed to make four videos, but this time I probably won't make more than this one.

Sunday, March 2, 2014

Non-winter overnighter in March


It was time for an overnighter again. The purpose of this one was to celebrate Toni's almost-win of the Rovaniemi 150, though you don't really need a reason to do an overnighter. This time we decided to go to the Töykkälä shelter, where I've only slept twice before. Since I had been a little sick a few days earlier, I decided to take the car to the Vajosuo parking place and ride from there, about one hour of riding from the shelter of the night.