Kits and Mortar

I spent some six hours at Grand Designs Live today, mainly taking video which I’m currently processing and uploading to Viddler, but also taking a lot of stills with my shiny new (to me) Nikon D70 which I got for my birthday. Unfortunately, there are some ongoing and significant problems with uploading stills to Flickr from a number of UK ISPs. I’ve been trying to upload 27 photos for the last hour - only 12 of them have made it and now I’m giving up. The connection at GDL has been a bit better, although not much, but the problem is not with the local wifi network but with the backbone.

That’s disappointing, not just because I have a lots of photos that I want to add to the blog, but also because I have some of today’s “topping out” ceremony for The House that Kevin Built. When the house frame is complete, a sprig of oak, or in this case a bundle of reed thatch, is nailed to the highest part and an offering of champagne is made to the gods and goddesses of the forest and/or reed bed to thank them for the materials that went into the house.

I’m also now starting to get to grips with the Nokia N82 camera phone that my lovely husband has leant me, and how well it handles video. Made a bit of a gaffe this morning when I took the first few videos in portrait instead of landscape, and discovered they don’t auto-rotate! Wasted a good hour finding rotation software, but managed it in the end. I also learnt that the mic is a bit rubbish, so you have to speak quite loudly and almost get in people’s faces in order to ensure they’re audible. I also learnt that compressing the video down to a manageable file size ensures that it looks rubbish in Viddler, so I may well re-upload this morning’s videos.

That said, I hope you’ll agree that the videos are worth it! They certainly make it a lot more fun for me, and much easier to cover more ground. If I can get it all edited tonight, I can upload it all whilst I sleep and blog it in the morning.