Sky Meadows is a quaint little park on the eastern side of the Blue Ridge mountains in Delaplane, Virginia. The park has a friendly park staff and offers well maintained facilities with a visitor center, gift shop , picnic shelter with grills, fishing pond, primitive camping, and the Mount Bleak house among other historical buildings and sites. The area outside the park is blanketed with charming Inns, restaurants, shops, and a short drive to the historic Town of Middleburg. Read the rest of this entry »
The GoPro HD systems are nifty little cameras. These little cameras packs features like 1080p video, 720p video at 60fps, 5MP photo, removable polycarbonate housing for protection, and waterproof up to 180′ all for around $300. With it’s small size and a few additional but inexpensive accessories it can be mounted virtually anywhere.
The most compelling aspect of this camera is my perception of how disposable the GoPro can be. Let me explain. In order to make my Canon 5d Mark II waterproof I would need to drop $1500 or more on a housing kit. Attaching it to a vehicle is not as expensive but would require a minimum of about $500 for a solid rig. The final investment for my 5d Mark II equals $2,000 compared to the $350 for the same capabilities from the GoPro. Now for my scenario; both systems are attached them to a car driving down the road at 70mph and there is a malfunction with both camera systems flying off the car and smashing into a million pieces after hitting a tree. For one camera system I will be crying in a fetal position while sucking on my thumb and calling for mommy after watching $5,000 of equipment vanish. The other system will cause me to growl and grunt a couple times while I drive to the nearest Best Buy to purchase another $300 camera. So while that scenario is unlikely, the GoPro allows me to put the camera in riskier situations with far less consequences if something catastrophic did occur and thus making it more disposable.
So with my family doing a vacation down at Myrtle Beach I decided to put it through its paces. Below is a time lapse of the beach from our condo.
Hint: For best quality turn on ‘HD’ on the bottom right if you go full screen.
While the GoPro does have it’s disadvantages, which may be discussed in another future post, for under $400 this camera system gives many great abilities that I plan on using in many future projects. I will make an attempt in updating this post with other videos from the beach trip when I can get around to editing them.
A couple days ago Grace and I were on our way to Reines RV in Manassas, Virginia to scout out our future home. I was craving some orange chicken so we first stopped by Panda Express to stuff our bellies. As per tradition we saved the fortune cookies for last but they have never been my favorite. There is something about the dry taste that never is satisfying for an end of the meal dessert and unless someone wants it, normally I open them up for the fortune and toss the cookie. But on that day the fortune was particularly fitting for the events surrounding the day.
Grace didn't want me to waste the cookie so I ate it. Blah.
Our first trip to Reines RV to check out 5th wheels didn’t pan out because the units where winterized Read the rest of this entry »
I know, I know, this is yesterdays news. One day old and all over the web and social media outlets. But this is my two cents and a quarter. If you haven’t read the article yet, the New York Times did a write up on the Lytro camera which allows you to shoot first and focus later.
Click around the image above to adjust the focus. By Lytro / Eric Cheng. Play around with more images at the Lytro picture gallery.
My first impression was, “lame, why not get it right the first time!” But then I thought of out of focus butterfly shot I missed last week. Read the rest of this entry »
“A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.” Lao Tzu
Our journey begins. Grace and I are on the road, figuratively and eventually literally, to becoming nomads and vagabonds. We have currently achieved step one in our goal of roaming the country, changing our life dramiticaly. But I am getting ahead of myself and so I will digress. Read the rest of this entry »
