A. Aronsson's WeBOLLog

I went together with a whole lot of teenagers on a Church Skiing camp this February. It was a tremendous amount of fun with a lot of social activities and, of course, skiing. I am not going to spend very much time describing what happened, but instead focus on pictures and video footage.

Last year I had a camera that I mounted on my person. This year I had bought a new cheap camera with better video capabilities, a Kodak EasyShare 570, and spent a lot of time prior to the trip making a bag for it so it too could be mounted.

I bumped into a problem though, this camera was extremely sensitive to snow and water, dampness in general. The previous camera would survive pretty much anything, as you could see in my previous skiing post, but this one died or started malfunctioning as soon as a few snowflakes touched it!

Naturally it was a big disappointment and I lost a few days of filming, the first day was too cold and the second I had to get the camera dry after filling it with snow, but it was alright when I tried it back where we stayed. I ended up holding the camera in my right hand while skiing so often the footage would get quite jumpy when there was action making it not very watchable!

All in all I recorded two hours of snow fun, the problem was piecing together a video as everything looked the same (snow and trees), so it was not a small task to pinpoint interesting things. I had to watch the entire thing and mark out points of interest, this without total silence except the video audio as I needed to hear what was said which made it quite boring! Like watching a movie without music. Still, it becomes easier to condense the footage if you space out the editing because on every occasion I have opened the project I cut away things that then seem uninteresting. I repeated this a bunch of times during nine months since the camp and finally there was a video ready, this one clocking in at almost six minutes! You can either watch it over at Youtube.com or play it embedded below. Enjoy :)

Update: I noticed that embeds does not get included in the email updates, I will make sure to add normal links to future posts… as this edit will not be included in the email, heh.

Yet again I went with my parents on a camping trip to Öland, to get away from home for a while, this was in July this year. It is a necessity for me to get out of town so it feels like a vacation and not just a super long weekend, if that makes sense. Like last year I took a number of photos and decided to post at least a few of them that I found somewhat interesting. They are from a few different places and occasions, the titles should be explanatory enough.

This happened at the beginning of August last year, 2008, at the end of my vacation. We were a couple of friends who had talked about visiting Liseberg, a funfair located in Gothenburg, and some of us actually ended up going there, even if many others were busy.

I had not visited Liseberg in a decade, for real! So quite a few rides were new for me, even old ones which I had never gotten to try before. Below are some… quite random photos.

One of the rides I had looked forward to greatly was Balder. It is not what you get when you ride it, but a wooden roller coaster. It sure presented some excitement, from the start of the queue to the end of the ride, and I was happily surprised by sudden dips and turns! Sadly, the second and third time was (naturally) not quite as fun as the first ride, apparently the surprises a first time ride gives is what works the best for me! Which might explain why I rode as many rides as I could muster :) Of course… I have a video of my first ride.

The day after we went to Universeum also in Gothenburg. It is a building filled with animals and… stuff. As animals are… well, pretty much covered on the Internet I feel I can leave those pictures unposted!

I have been putting off posting this for… well, a year! I had planned to get this posted before this years skiing trip, but I ran out of time. I had to cut down the video from 30 minutes too, which is something I thought I had done, but apparently not! Which explains why I had not posted it.

Last year I bought my Ixus 75 camera right before leaving, so it was brand new when I brought it out into the wild. After the trip I decided I would put up this blog because I had snapped a bunch of pictures and recorded some video I wanted to share. Actually the very first post on this blog was from that trip, with a video of when I smashed my face! I never got around to posting the pictures, as I focused on just getting to know the software and tweak it till I was happy.

I had bought a really cheap video capable digital camera specifically for this trip so I could record clips in the slopes. Luckily the case that was included in the package was easily modifiable to be mountable on my body via a cargo strap!

The positions of the camera are: on my helmet, low on my ankle, high on my ankle, around my middle and backwards on my ankle.

I will try to get pictures and video up a bit sooner from this years trip!

This summer I was invited to join my parents and my brother to camp a week in their mobile home on Öland, an island outside the main land of Sweden. Hesitantly I accepted the offer, but I regret nothing as it was very nice to get away for a while!

While I was there I could not help but spamming photographs with my camera, as well as videos, which I guess is my normal behavior. I tried out my underwater camera housing in the ocean, but the sub surface visibility was incredibly bad, and it was my first prolonged experience of swimming around with flippers and a diving mask, both very cheaply bought.

Instead of writing a ton of text to insert the images into I’ve added titles to the images themselves. My choice of picture viewer for WordPress is Shutter Reloaded, sadly it does not yet support using the title of the IMG tag as a caption, it takes the title from the A tag, but the default behavior of WordPress is to post the title in the IMG tag… I’ve requested it twice, but nothing yet. I really like Shutter Reloaded except for this small issue.

Anyway, here comes the pictures! In chronological order, even.

I was going to post just a few pictures, but apparently it turned into quite a lot… oh well. Beneath is the camera running while I soak it in fresh water to dissolve the sea salt which would otherwise store up in the underwater house making the buttons wonky.

Just a little late, but I still have more summer pictures! Not sure when the next batch will be posted, but that will most likely be the last for this years summer :)