Airwheel A3 'road' test

After a week of waiting and a misdirected delivery, the new Airwheel arrived on Friday. The A3 (sit down and orange) joins the S3 (stand up and blue) which we have had for eighteen months. The S3 has done over 600km around Oxford and has proved both reliable and fun to ride. It's even done duty as a video dolly. The S3 is currently available for NZ$1,795 while the A3 is fantastic value at $1,295 -  available in New Zealand from www.airwheels.co.nz

Bethany had only been on the A3 about 5 minutes when I shot this clip of her outrunning Annette on the S3. (Apologies for the video quality - Google seem to have butchered it during the upload)

And here is a short, hand-held video taken while riding the S3 at the "Spring into Oxford" show. At slow speed, the S3 produces a much smoother video than walking. Now all I need is a gimble setup and it will all be sweet.

Airwheel A3 'road' test

After a week of waiting and a misdirected delivery, the new Airwheel arrived on Friday. The A3 (sit down and orange) joins the S3 (stand up and blue) which we have had for eighteen months. The S3 has done over 600km around Oxford and has proved both reliable and fun to ride. It's even done duty as a video dolly. The S3 is currently available for NZ$1,795 while the A3 is fantastic value at $1,295 -  available in New Zealand from www.airwheels.co.nz

Bethany had only been on the A3 about 5 minutes when I shot this clip of her outrunning Annette on the S3. (Apologies for the video quality - Google seem to have butchered it during the upload)

And here is a short, hand-held video taken while riding the S3 at the "Spring into Oxford" show. At slow speed, the S3 produces a much smoother video than walking. Now all I need is a gimble setup and it will all be sweet.

A Mountain and a Car

Another one from the infra-red department - this time a false colour IR picture. This was taken in the field behind our house and, though it is Spring here, I chose blue and orange tones to give an almost Autumn look. False colour IR can often look a bit bland but I'm quite pleased with the way this one turned out with a range of colours and tones - a change from the usual B&W IR anyway.

Mt. Oxford - false colour IR, Canon A590IS

Over two months since the last post, so I'll try to do a little better next time. But to catch up, two weeks ago was the annual "Spring into Oxford" fair, which has grown steadily over the last few years. This year there were about 250 cars on show including this lovely red BMW Isetta 300 - almost exactly the same as my first car - right down to the colour. Though, from memory, I think mine had a conventional chrome bumper running side to side.

BMW Isetta 300

How many people can you get in one of these and still drive? Well, I think it managed five - three across the bench and another two on the parcel shelf with their heads sticking through the roof - those were the days...

Like a toy

I was 17 years old when the spirograph was first brought out as a toy, so my introduction must have been with nieces and nephews. Nevertheless, I recall it as being an enormous source of fun and, in a similar vein, I found the cycloid drawing machine to be equally fascinating. I'm pretty sure that there is something similar going on with the fractals, but I only made the connection while working on the Royal Dragon Boat:

Royal Dragon Boat

I guess it was all those repetitive swirls and curves that brought the spirograph to mind. But a fractal does have that same repetitive, mathematical, self-similar nature as a spirograph so it shouldn't be a surprise; I just wish that Apophysis was as easy to use as a spirograph used to be. Anyway, eventually, the dragon boat appeared and after a short trip to Photoshop it was soon emerging silently from a cloud-bank into the moonlight.

Four days of fractals

We have just come through the coldest weekend of winter - which isn't saying much, in what has turned out to be a quite balmy winter this year. Anyway, it was cold enough to spend most of the time indoors stoking the fire and generating some fractals. Click on each picture to view it large - there's lots of detail.

Clock Work

Clock Work is a pure fractal - generated in Apothysis and polished in Photoshop. Red shift is a fractal with some additional elements and work in Photoshop.

Red Shift

Finally, Shelob's Lair, is a fractal combined with images of the Waimakariri Gorge and a spider.  A rather dark theme and a dark picture, again best viewed large.

Shelob's Lair

Making fractals on the new PC is a world of difference from my old machine. So much faster that I find myself actually spending longer working on a single piece simply because it's not so frustratingly slow.

Breakout

The purist in me says this is neither photography nor painting and, if it can't make up its mind what to be, then it's just a bastard child trying on names it doesn't deserve. Maybe.

But the truth is I like it; in places the camera shows through and in others, details are brushed aside in a smear of colour. I find the net result quite compelling as though the idea of the landscape is trying to break out into its own reality.

Sleeping in a silo

 Whether it's the prairies of Alberta or the 'metropolis' of Little River, silos have long been recognised as a potential place to take shelter - provided that is, no one is about to empty or fill your selected silo. There is no chance of that happening with the Little River silos - they have been kitted out specifically for the traveller. This last weekend we spent our first night in a silo.

Downstairs

Upstairs

As a fun place for a stop-over,  the silos are well worth a visit but I thought them somewhat impractical for a longer stay. Nevertheless, they were well maintained, clean and tidy, and there is a well-stocked cafe is right next door, run by the same people who also run the art gallery.

No, the silos aren't bent - all taken with a fisheye lens - quirky, just like the silos.

OldFord

OldFord, that's been my Geocaching name for as long as, and an appropriate description for this very tidy yellow Model A, found sitting in Oxford's Main Street this weekend. A busy Sunday Main Street hardly provides a great background, especially with an all-encompassing fish-eye lens but, dialing back the realism into the interpretative zone, produced something that I found quite pleasing in an illustrative, comic-booky sort of way.

Cosmic Surfer

My first fractal for a while and my first on the new PC. I recognised the Cosmic Surfer as soon as I saw her on the screen; it was just a case of drawing her out from the mathematical mist. When rendering fractals, I am used to it taking hours, sometimes many hours, so when I saw the number '8' in the 'time remaining' I thought, 'eight hours; I'll let it run over night' - only it wasn't 8 hours, it was 8 minutes - oh the joy of a processor with 4 physical and 8 virtual cores!

Last August I wrote about the ease of upgrading to Windows 10 and how, in my view, it was the sweetest Windows upgrade ever. Well, that was nothing compared to Windows 10 on a new PC. Unconstrained by legacy decisions about which storage devices things should live on, Windows 10 looks neater and tidier than it did as an upgrade. And it does what an operating system is supposed to - gets out of the way and lets you get on with actual work. In fact, working on the new PC makes me feel a bit like the Cosmic Surfer.

Shelter from the storm

A stormy day, an abandoned house and Irene, my infrared camera. I'm quite pleased with how this turned out; usually, IR photography is a sunny day activity for me, but the subject caught my eye and the false colours add an 'other worldly' look to what would otherwise have been a rather drab scene.