Montmartre, Paris, March 2019
Post from RICOH THETA. – Spherical Image – RICOH THETA
We’re just back from a trip to France and Switzerland. You should see a picture from Paris above, and be able to drag the image around and zoom in and out. You might be able to see the Eiffel Tower if you look in the right direction! If things don’t work, try another browser.
More of my spherical images are on the Ricoh Theta site, including some from this recent trip. Here I am inside the Musée d’Orsay, for example. On that site, you can probably also view them full-screen.
Also, here’s a short bit of video, from the ski slopes of Saas-Fee, Switzerland, last week, where we also found a nice spot for lunch.
Just before Christmas, Tilly (my spaniel) and I went to the Dordogne and back in our campervan. I made a video about it, which, while it may be of interest only to travel vlog and ‘van life’ enthusiasts, does have a bit of novelty value, because I filmed it on a spherical (360-degree) camera.
This means that after you’ve watched it, you can go back and watch it again from a completely different angle and see what was happening behind you!
I’ll put the link here, rather than embedding it, because this is something you want to watch on the YouTube site. Or, better still, in the YouTube app on your tablet, or phone, or VR headset…
If I had had more time, I would have made it shorter 🙂
This was really just an experiment for me, and I learned a great deal about the challenges and opportunities of filming and editing this particular medium, which I may write about in due course.
The sky over my campsite yesterday morning; I hadn’t seen any blue up there for quite some time!
And the sky over the same campsite as I returned to it in the evening:
My pitch was just under the darkest bit at the bottom right.
It soon settled down to the standard grey rainclouds again afterwards, though!
‘Marmotte’ est mon nom,
Here in France (where I’m from)
Though you foreigners may spell it ‘marmot’
But we aren’t very taken
With those who mistaken-
ly call us groundhogs (which we are not)
Geoff took some nice photos of me on the slopes today. I’ve edited out the ones that made me look less cool.
If you read my earlier post, you may be amused to notice that the poles are not the same colour in all of these pictures!
Only people who are better skiers than me should really try shooting video while in motion, but it was a nice gentle slope!
However, I did have an interesting and rather embarrassing experience today. We stopped off for lunch at a favourite spot, after which Geoff , the star of the movie, picked up his board, and I my skis, and we set off for another happy afternoon on the slopes.
At the end of the day, Geoff wanted to get his board rewaxed, so we headed down to the rental shop. There was a man waiting outside, who pointed at me.
“Ah! You!”‘, he said. Confused, I tried to work out whether I knew him, or why he might otherwise be accosting me. He soon explained. “You have my skis!”
And I looked at the poles and skis he was holding, and sure enough, they were mine. At lunchtime, he must have placed them on the rack next to Geoff’s board, and yours truly had walked up and pinched both them and his poles (which were, I’m embarrassed to say, completely different from mine), clamped the skis onto my boots (which fit perfectly) and skied for the whole afternoon without noticing. I’m not sure whether the fact that I was so oblivious to my equipment means I’m a good or bad skier…
Anyway, the poor chap, a very nice Dutchman, had waited for about an hour for me to come back and then, having called ahead, had availed himself of my equipment to ski over to the rental shop marked on the skis, which was where we found him waiting. I wonder how long it would have taken us to notice if we hadn’t decided to drop in on the way back…
The moral of this story is probably that ski-hire places should always get the mobile number of the people who rent their equipment. Or that they shouldn’t lend them to people as foolish as me.
© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser
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