Västerby in August

The weekend was perfect for an overnighter (S48O for two nights out?) with the kids. My wife was busy with some other things the entire weekend, the weather was good and the kids willing. I would actually have preferred to get going on Saturday, since Friday was a busy day for me, but the kids insisted on being out for two nights, so we jumped into the car and drove the 110 km to Västerby on Friday evening.

We parked the car at 20:30 and started walking the short bit to the first shelter of the Långträsket lake.

After a short while we came upon this new little forest road. It turned out that a road had been built almost all the way to the shelter, which I have rather mixed feelings about. It is great since it makes the shelter easily accessible for familys with very small children as well as reachable with a wheelchair (with some effort). It is not good since it makes the shelter easily accessible, making it an easier target for vandalism and possible drinking parties. This particular shelter is on a very nice place (like all the shelters in Västerby), so the wheelchair aspect I can certainly support. Still, since the forest road leading to the entire area is closed for most of the summer, this still doesn't compute.

Arriving around sunset at nine in the evening. The evenings are getting darker and the November misery comes closer...

The boys wanted to try their luck with some fishing.

I started a fire and put up the tent.

A frog was more interesting.

Toasted bread with mettwurst and cheese.

The boys then went to the tent for some reading, while I stayed out for some photography.

It was very close to full moon.

Good night!

The night was calm and the temperature fell down to about 9C before sunrise. The outer tent was rather wet from the inside by condensation and from the outside by condensation from the fog.

Fishing before breakfast, still without results. Though the boys do have their fights, moments like this are quite nice to see, when the younger boy tries to teach the older one how to use a reel and rod.

Grilled sandwhiches for breakfast...

... followed by marshmallows.

We were in no hurry and stayed in the place for lunch as well.

Pasta with pesto for lunch. Beats freeze-dried food any day.

Finally on the move again some time after lunch.

Some remaining blueberries still affected our velocity.

Continuing. We soon passed the second shelter of Långträsket, which probably had been empty during the night (the sound of firewood chopping would have been heard in the calm weather).

We continued to the next lake, Grabbskog Storträsk, where we arrived at the shelter after around two hours.

Boat race.

Soon it was time for pancakes. This time I had two bags of pancake mix (just add water), more than enough.

Thus the evening passed with us doing some reading, fishing and not much more.

I rigged up the inner tent inside the shelter, to provide protection against the mosquitoes, of which there were only a few. Maybe this was unnecessary, but the kids have less tolerance for bugs than I have.

Some final fishing before going to sleep. I felt sorry for the younger boy. Before the trip he didn't know what to do with all the fish we were going to get, and we still hadn't gotten anything.

The shelter is in a very nice place. All the four shelters in the area are in better places than any shelter in the Turku area. These shelters seem to be used quite at bit during the summer. According to the guest book of the shelter, this shelter was occupied the previous night, and we also heard some sound from one of the Långträsket shelters. Around nine o'clock in the evening, a couple also came to check if this shelter was empty. When it was not, they continued to Långträsket. Looking at the size of their backpacks, I assume they had also had a tent, though.

Good night.

At one point I woke up to the shrieking sound of a fox, which actually can sound quite terrifying if you don't know what it is, but otherwise the night went well. The kids can obviously sleep through anything. Earlier this summer they were totally unaffected by a thunderstorm closing in, while I counted seconds and thought out a contingency plan...

The last attempts.

Water for coffee and porridge.

My Enlightened Prodigy X quilt provided some needed warmth.

For once, the porridge was great.

On the move again.

The deer flies didn't seem to go for the kids, while the pesky little bugs liked me. Maybe the kids are too small and the deer flies only react when a big enough mammal closes in.

Trying to correct the imbalance between pine cones on the land and in the water.

Walking on.

The fall is coming. This was a nice summer weekend, but the nights are already getting colder and the day shorter.

We arrived at the car and drove home in time for lunch. This was some excellent quality time with the kids.

New camera and video

In the beginning of January I bought the GoPro Hero 3 Black Edition, the flag ship of the GoPro series of action cameras featuring very impressive specifications. Seven months later I sold it. I'll explain the reasons below.

My main video camera is the Panasonic GH2, which with a suitable hack still is one of the very best hybrid cameras/videocameras available. It is a competent still image camera and the video quality is far superior to that of the Canon EOS 60D, which I've previously had. Being a m43 camera it is also small and light, which also goes for the optics. I'm very satisfied with it, but since it is not weatherproofed, I needed something to complement it with. Despite me being less than impressed with POV videos, I still decided to buy the GoPro Hero 3 Black Edition when it came out, since it was so impressive on paper and all the pseudo reviews on the internet just said it was the best thing ever. The first promotional video also showed that it can yield truly excellent results.

Hence I came to buy the GoPro for the wrong reasons. I bought it as a weather proof video camera, in addition to some small POV usage needs. After seven months I can conclude that it is a great POV camera (though not without its faults) and a poor general video camera. My observations are the following:

• The resolution in 2.7K video mode is great, probably very close to that of the GH2 in 1080p mode.
• The fisheye lens is the worst part of the camera. The very wide field of view gives a good illusion of speed for POV purposes, even when there is none. The fisheye distorsions makes the lens fairly unusable for anything else, and even in 2.7K mode there is not that much resolution left after defishing the video in the editor.
• No shutter means that the GoPro uses far too fast shutter speeds in good light.
• I didn't like the lack of control over the exposure. The automatic exposure isn't always right.
• The excellent time lapse functionality is hampered by the lack of exposure control and the strong optical distortions.
• No viewfinder. The smart phone interface over WiFi is great, but does not replace a viewfinder.
• The battery life is poor.
• The form factor is good for one purpose, the chest harness, which is one of the best POV angles. For anything else, the form factor of the Contour or Sony action camera would be better.
• The colours didn't mix well with those of the Panasonic GH2.

The above observations might sound a bit negative, but keep in mind that I really bought it for the wrong reasons. A quick search on the internet should give plenty of positive reviews.

To replace the GoPro Hero 3 Black Edition I wanted a weatherproof compact camera with good video quality. The weatherproof compact cameras generally don't have a great image quality, but after some googling and remembering the videos made by Joe, I settled for the Panasonic FT series. The FT series have a good video quality and support for the 25p frame rate of the PAL world, which is missing from many other alternatives. As it happened, the new Panasonic FT5 was about to be released, enabling me to find the FT4 for a very good price from a Finnish web shop. I ordered it and it arrived.

The first tests showed it to be pretty much what I expected. The still image quality is like that of a low end pocket camera, but the video quality is better. It has some sort of periscope optics with a maximum aperture of F3.3 in 28 mm equivalent focal length. There is only one other aperture alternative, F10, which I assume is an ND filter, since it would not make sense to have a true F10 in a camera this small. The diffraction would affect the sharpness too much. The time lapse mode is unfortunately mostly useless, with a fixed interval of one minute, but otherwise the camera seems to have everything needed in a camera of this kind.

I decided to do a video during an overnighter two weeks ago with this camera only, in order to test it thoroughly enough for my purposes. The Panasonic FT4 supports both MP4 and AVCHD video recording, with a little lower bitrates in AVCHD mode. I'm assuming that the video quality is the same in both modes, since the AVCHD can probably make do with a lower bitrate due to a better compression method. The maximum bitrate I encountered in MP4 mode during this test was 23 Mbit/s, which isn't too bad (the hacked GH2 does over 60 Mbit/s, though). The following video was the result of the test.

I'm actually quite satisfied with the result. The camera is quick and easy to use and the video quality is quite ok. The actual resolution is lower than that of the GH2, which might (barely) be visible on Vimeo, but I would still estimate that it is better than that of the Canon EOS 60D. The dynamic range is lower than on the GH2, but the colors seem quite similar, so there should be no problem mixing the footage of the two. The automatic exposure in video seems good, choosing suitable shutter times. I dialed in exposure compensation based on the on-screen histogram, but otherwise I let the camera do its thing. Some handheld shots also showed that the image stabilization worked fine.