As Paul has recounted on Dan's blog. We went up Ben Nevis at the weekend. Hardest thing I've ever done, very grateful to Paul for lieing to me all the way up about how the summit was just around the corner. Since I thought I was unlikely to be doing anything like that again I thought I'd try a photography experiment, a sort of time-lapse thing. Chris was kind enough to lend me an N95 for the trip and I made a sling for it out of duck tape and those tie things you always get in toy-packaging. I hung it from the cross-strap on my rucksack so it was about chest height and set it to take a picture every minute and tag it with GPS data.
On the way up it worked for precisely three minutes. But, on the way down it worked for a bit longer, so this video is about an hour of descent from the top of Ben Nevis, compressed into a minute, down to about 1000m, where it stopped working. Not sure why. I like it though, it works as proof of concept. I'm not sure what the concept is exactly, but it's proved. The pictures themselves are all in this flickr set and I'm sure there's something clever you could do with the attached GPS data, but I'm not sure what.
a bit of a descent of ben nevis from russelldavies on Vimeo.
I'm sure the GPS data could be turned into a riot of slightly obsessive information visualization with Processing or something, and I'm the sort of sick individual who enjoys that sort of thing...
Posted by: Andrew | April 30, 2008 at 10:45 AM
This is really cool. I like the transition from snow to rocks, and the amazing view when you stop for a while at the end.
Are the bits when it whites out you falling over?
Posted by: Dylan Trees | April 30, 2008 at 06:05 PM
Did you set Flickr to import the geodata?
http://www.flickr.com/account/geo/exif
Also export as KML for Google Earth...
Posted by: James | May 05, 2008 at 08:52 PM
... because if you did, you could make this kind of thing with it: http://tinyurl.com/6fbfcl
Posted by: James | May 06, 2008 at 07:07 PM
Hi Russ,
Just out of interest - How did you set your N95 to take pictures automatically periodically?
I'm interested in doing a similar project and I'd love to know what software you used.
Cheers in advance,
James.
Posted by: James Whatley | May 16, 2008 at 09:43 AM