Sunrise

There are a few weeks in Autumn and Spring when our early morning walk-about coincides with the Sunrise and the past few days we have been greeted with some lovely coloured scenes.

This morning looking across the village school car park:



My first attempt at cropping and processing a photo using Polarr Photo Editor in Ubuntu.

Darting About

Rarely seen any dragonflies stay still this year. In fact I've only seen a few in flight so I was pleased to see this one settle in my garden long enough to photo.



It looks to me to be a female Common Darter.

A Relaxing Read

Just been perusing one of the many e-books I seem to have stored away.

The Chuck-It List by Steven Bennett
He describes it as 'Things I have no intention of doing before bucketing'

A few quotes:
..........
Learn a new language:
There are no new languages

Try out a new profession:
I'm going to try Retired Millionaire

Achieve your ideal weight:
I did this at birth. It's been downhill ever since.

Run a marathon:
A little known fact about modes of transport is that they are made in direct proportion to the distance to be travelled. Feet, small distances. Automobile, long distances.

See the Northern Lights:
From what I've read the Northern Lights are in the North, and further study shows that the North is cold. Doesn't Hawaii have lights?
..........

No idea where I found this book.
A search of your favourite free e-book repository may well find a copy.

Monday Montage

Here we are again, happy as can be
All good friends and jolly good company.
Driving round the town, out upon a spree
All good friends and jolly good company.
........

(Jolly Good Company, 1931, written by Raymond Wallace)
We don't seem to hear many happy song lyrics these days.

Another week, another month, another WidsMob Montage.
Last week's was



Well done Adrian, Ragged Robin, Wilma and The Weaver who had no problem identifying it as



a light switch.

On to this week's montage which is

 

what?

If you would like to guess what it is please leave your answer in the comments.
They will be revealed, along with the original photo, next Monday.

Disaster Leads to a Video Experiment

A few days ago I had a slight disaster. I needed a hard drive to install in an old DVR for my night sky video recording experimentation. I had two in my old desktop PC which was running Windozy XP. I took one out, installed it in the DVR and formatted it. When I went to start up the PC - no operating system found. Carelessly I had removed the wrong drive. After a deep thunk I decided to install a different operating system - Linux Ubuntu. This is very similar to the OS usually used on the Raspberry Pi so I am a bit familiar with it.

It is not 100% working on my old PC as it does not recognise the on-board graphics chips. A common problem with a certain make of chip so I am limited to a fairly low resolution display until the replacement PC I have ordered arrives from Germany. It has been built with Ubuntu in mind and pre installed. Why from Germany? It was cheaper than any similar offering I could find in the UK, even with transport costs.

Ubuntu desktop on my present set-up



Whilst browsing the available programs for Ubuntu I was pleasantly surprised to find Kdenlive. A video editor, free (or shareware) as are the vast majority of programs made to run under a Linux based operating system.  Once I had installed it to try it out I was more than staggered to see what it was capable of doing, though slowly on this PC. The new one should be faster.

The program looks fairly bland on screen but I am still experimenting with how to set things up.



There are many ways of tweaking, enhancing, altering video clips. The one I had a go with was Charcoal. This produces a result which looks like an animated drawing.



As I mentioned, my old PC runs slowly. It took nearly 8 minutes to render that 45 second video. It needs more experimenting to see how clean the output can get. Last night it was past bedtime by the time I had finished.

Having a Flutter or Two

With the recent unseasonally hot afternoons I have actually seen a few butterflies.
In fact Lincolnshire recorded the highest temperature in the UK today.
It was some 6C above the seasonal average at around 23C. Alas it's not going to last.

A Red Admiral was good enough to pose on the Ivy



A Comma settled on one of the hanging baskets





Yesterday a Small Copper was feeding on a Dandelion in the back garden but its behaviour was more typical - flying off just as I got it in focus. At least the somewhat overgrown grass was dry enough for me to give it a trim. My garden is not what I would call large but my phone, which was in my pocket, indicated that I walked half a mile while mowing the grass.

The Impressionist in Me (2)

Remember this from a few days ago?



How were the pictures made?
Adrian was correct in surmising it was something to do with a new app.

I found a camera app for the iPhone (NightCap) which is designed for night photography, especially sky photography. It has several different methods for taking photos of stars and meteors. One facility can continuously take slightly delayed shots but instead of saving them separately it combines them in real time. Me being me I decided to see what would happen with a normal daytime view.

This is the area I was looking at



It was quite a breezy day so much of the hedge was moving.
In consequence various parts of the hedge were recorded in slightly different places.
I think I kept the app running for 5 seconds or thereabouts.

Resulting in



I added the frame.

Some fine night I will set up the iPhone on a tripod outdoors to see what happens.
If shooting long enough it should record star trails.