Category Archives: Cycling

Sparrowhawk down

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20°C, rain then clearing before the next lot. 42½ miles cycling

Back on the bike at last! The weather forecast suggested rain and lots of it so I didn’t take a camera. That was a mistake because I saw something remarkable.
In the road near Lullington was a bird, as I passed it I saw a glimpse of bright yellow eye- and thought it was an Owl, so I turned round and went back.
I nudged it with my foot- and to my surprise it moved forward, flapping against the ground and further out into the road. So with a protective raincoat wrapped around my hands I picked it up. The yellowish legs were armed with claws far more fearsome than a cat’s so I was quite gingerly picking it up. There was something magical about that creature- I turned it over and it made eye contact. Turning it about to look for injuries and guesss the type of bird- it kept eye contact all the time, not blinking, just swiveling its head.
I didn’t know what to do to improve its chances, but over the fence was a flat area of warm, dry straw so reaching over the nettles- I placed it there. On landing on its belly, he immediately turned its head and looked at me again. I could still see those chalcedony eyes as I rode away. Still can.
 
Later; after looking it up in the book, it was a juvenile sparrowhawk.
What a shame about the camera!

Audale

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16°C, !; C=41 miles

Odd the things you see when out in the countryside. See photo below.
 
Turpentine: this is going to take longer than I thought. The picture (to be posted later) doesn’t look very different -which is inself, no big deal. Today’s session was spent working out the anatomy and pose of the main character. Something worth persisting with to get this right which affects the success of the whole picture for the next week or two.

Don’t look right

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8°C, cold NE wind, warm sun and a struggle between them to decide the temperature. C=69 miles

Pain in the neck: it could be a pulled muscle, trouble is it locks solid when I look over the right shoulder so I have ot look well over the left instead.
Isle of The Dead: this Böcklin painting came to mind when I rode past a small fishing lake today. See the photo below. It might be a picture depicting the River Styx with the character Charon in the boat in white, but then maybe it’s not.
 

Sprung, starting today

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13°C, sun & light clouds. C=52 miles

It’s now spring. I know you’re thinking "equinox " but today I swallowed the first fly of the year- that makes it spring now.
 
Little camera: cycling has come full circle so to speak. In the mid-ninties, I started cycling to take my camera places out of town, beyond my normal range. Now I have bought a camera to take out cycling in case I see something. For today, checking out the camera’s functions and quality was the aim. For 70 quid it is ok, all I expected really. But in absolute terms; there is colour bleeding, the image is over-sharpened and it lacks detail in textures. It could be more user-friendly; there is no direct control over shutter speed/aperture, the power switch is tricky to use – especially with cold hands and it sufferes the problem all digital compacts seem to have these days- automation.
 
Cycling: a shorter ride today, but the first of the year on the racing bike. That is significant. Note a picture of cows with their calves. They all stood up when I pulled over ant took the camera out. Cows have a keen sense of curiosity.

Fusty, me?

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0-9°C, , light wind

Car-alarm birds

Riding to work just out from town, I could hear a car alarm. There were no cars in that direction, only fields of sheep. getting closer to a leafless tree, the sound got clearer- but still no cars. My ears told me I was looking straight at it, but all I could see was a bare tree and one bird about the size of a starling. Has the car alarm sound entered into the song-birds’ repetoir?
 
Excellent site found on with lots of tips on the use of good english, AskOxford.
 
Here is a quote from a forum linking to my website:

Quote:
Originally Posted by Saffy
I have a copy of 3d max and, I think I said this before, I’m interested in modeling for FC. Trouble is, I am a complete noob with graphic design. I mean, I don’t know even the most basic elements of building models for FC.

What I’m looking for is a somewhat comprehesive guide, be it online or even a bit of mentoring from a more experienced designer … something that pertains as closely as possible to modeling for FC. I’m also looking for the tutorial files for 3d max, i.e. building a chess set, since I can’t seem to locate them anywhere.

Thanks.

heh, don’t worry, everyone has to start somewhere. i’ve only built about 6-7 models myself. i didn’t really have any sort of training, just one day figured it’d be fun to do – so i bugged one of more knowledgeable friends to death with questions, and looked up lots of tutorials on the net – they’re not hard to find, just google. it’s hard to find one that describes how to build a ship, plane or something really close to what you want to build, but that really shouldn’t matter – as long as you can understand how 3dsmax (and modeling) works, you can build anything you want.

when i was getting the hang of 3ds, i was building aircraft – this tutorial helped me out pretty well:

http://www.mdalgleish.clara.net/tut…uilder-tut1.htm

though the terminolgy may seem a bit advanced, it covers a lot of the basics (like welding, shaping, mirroring, etc.) fairly well, and has lots of images and animated .gifs to help you.

start on building something basic (a squarish building or a flat-deck aircraft carrier, for example) to get used to everything. usually the first few models wont be good (i still need to work on my first ones to get them to a running FC standard) but once you get the hang of things, it’s pretty easy. just remember to stick within the guidelines that are in the documents on the forum, and just go with it.

washed out from the front?

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9°C, showers, some with rainbows. C=only 33 miles

Two things while cycling today.
1/ Passing Catton Hall estate, I was looking towards the river trent. There were two black & white shapes that looked like dead cows on the banks. An odd and disturbing sight so I went to have a look. Getting closer they began to look more like dead horses, piebald ones. Perhaps victims of drowning?
From ten feet away, there they were, lying in the cold grass next to the fast flowing river. Suddenly one then the other got up, clinking their heavy metal chains. They looked startled, the nearest one had the chain wrapped twice round a leg which shook loose as it tried to gallop south along the bank. I decided to back off , clearly I was causing more stress than they needed right then. I felt quite sorry for those two.
 
2/ Coming back through Whittington I heard s skidding sound, having heard it like that before, I’m conditioned to look behind in case I need to evade. A young motorcyclist was sliding to a halt behind me about 15 yards back. No other vehicles there, I pulled over and went back to see the bloke lying partly under his bike. He was out cold, another guy was on the scene by then too, then another few. It looked like he came round a blind bend, saw me and braked hard loosing the front wheel and going down. A classic front wheel skid I’d say. He was a learner, though with a helmet on he was out cold for a few minutes. We got the bike off him and put it in the church car-park.
 
There is a technique to braking on wet surfaces, and unless he has faulty brakes/tyres he can’t have done it right. You can’t stay upright with a front wheel skid, back ones are recoverable- front ones never are. So there is no secret to applying less brake to the front wheel on wet roads. In really poor surfaces then don’t use the front wheel at all.
 
I don’t yet know what injuries he has, a broken leg is possible, and so is concussion. The medics will worry about that.

Cold, down to the bone

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10°C, wind & sun. c=42 miles.

Not today, but Tuesday left me Cold down to the bones. I was probably wearinbg just a slightly less than ideal, but over a long period of time (3 hours cycling) I became deeply cold. It took all evening to warm up. I probably needed one of those deep hot Japanese baths to warm up in. Today’s ride was in windy but warmer air- about 2°C higher, no need to wrap up. So, only a degree makes all the difference.

The Horse Stalker picture may be finished. that makes two. I may get round to post ing a "fin" picture of it here. You can then compare with the photoshop prototype in yesterday’s post. I’m a good lad- I promised to get it done during the half-term holiday. Below is a picture taken in RAW format and imported into Photoshop, the image quality is better in some ways, but the skin tones are a bit flat. Clearly a need is there to use that RAW import plugin differently.

The big melt

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9°C, , flooding everywhere. C=71miles

Cycling: the snow is all but gone. All the rivers and streams around here are either full of have burst their banks already. Conditions were good for a nice long ride though, the only obstacles were the wind and several floods in the road that I had to wade through.

Overall, it was a day that deserve more photographs, a pocket camera would have been ideal, so I shall shop around.