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Finding the time to enjoy the Cycling season this spring was complicated. Between the rain and bad weather it was hard to find two days in a row with good weather. As a consequence of this I have not been very active. I set myself the goal of cycling 50 kilometres per week which is conservative and I have been unable to reach that goal. During this time I am really happy about one thing. I started climbing every Thursday with a Glocals group from Lausanne. We go to Rocspot, an indoor climbing wall where you can practice routes from 4a up to 9a or more. It has indoor and exterior walls. This place is perfect for rainy days and training. Go when the weather is nice. You have the freedom to choose your routes. I am really happy with one achievement during this day’s ride. I reached 57.2 km/h cycling down from La Rippe to Crassier. For some reason I had the power to reach that speed. That isn’t bad for a mountain bike with slick tires. [gallery columns=“2” size=“medium” ids=“3019,3020”] A good reason to cycle in the countryside is of course to see nature change from season to season, to see the crops from their infancy to their harvest. Today I saw two combine harvesters. One was collecting crops and the other was travelling between fields. Two days ago when I was cycling I passed by the Paléo festival fields and saw that event tents are going up. As a last thought it is that time of the year when you cycle hard and when you stop you feel really warm. I love that feeling. I hope to cycle a lot more in coming weeks and months.

It is interesting to watch Slow motion climbing because you get to see precisely what people are doing. You get to see how each muscle group is moving and you see how much the body swings as someone jumps from one hold to another. It allows you to appreciate the subtlety of the moves. People like to say that rock climbing is about technique rather than strength but it is evident from these slow motion sequences that muscle groups are working hard. You see the arm muscles, the arm muscles and the back muscles move. You also see how the legs act as counterweights. The video above would be better if it was one or two minutes. The same can be said about the video below. What makes slow motion interesting is to catch details that you would not otherwise notice. Ideally slow motion edits should show the action in real time and then show the same action in slow motion. The beauty of slow motion is that you can see how technically perfect a move was. In some cases a person starts from vertical and goes for another hold. In this action they go from vertical to horizontal, swinging on their fingertips. Slow motion brings the effort to life. There are other moments where a massive effort, when seen in real time, is clear to see When you watch that same motion in slow motion it looks relaxed and serene. That is the beauty of this medium. Slow motion should highlight the beauty of a well executed move to help emphasise that it was technically good. Slow motion should be used sparingly.

In recent months we have seen articles about self driving cars and ethics. The question the research asks is whether to kill, a group of people, the driver of the car or others. The question is perfectly logical if you have never driven a car. If you have never driven a car then you believe that accidents may be unavoidable.

So these guys posed these kinds of ethical dilemmas to several hundred workers on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to find out what they thought. The participants were given scenarios in which one or more pedestrians could be saved if a car were to swerve into a barrier, killing its occupant or a pedestrian. source

When I think of Great Britain I think of the BBC and I think of the Natural History Units. I also think of radio programs like In Our Time, From Our Own Correspondent and Hard Talk. I also think of BBC World and the quality of their news coverage. I mention these current affairs programs because I believe that the British provide quality content. They also inform, educate and entertain us. That is their purpose. In a healthy media environment the media should inform and educate their audiences. They should provide us with the facts and context for everything they write about. They should provide us with neutral and unbiased information. Radio and Television broadcasters were held to this standard until recently. With Video on demand services increasing in number and with the number of channels made available through satellite broadcasting and digital audio broadcasting opinion has found its way on air. This made it easier for satellite and television broadcasting to share opinions rather than facts.

For several weeks or even months I was afraid that the EU Referendum, BREXIT, would result in a bad outcome. On Thursday the British people went to vote. On Thursday night I was watching. When I saw Gibraltar vote to stay in the EU I relaxed enough to manage sleep. On Friday Morning British people around the world woke up to the news that our nation had voted to leave the European Union. Some people were shocked and never expected it to happen. I was terrified that it would. For months before Brexit I commented via the social media that I was tired of seeing so many anti-European stories. When I read about refugees I said that the story should focus on the push factors rather than shame European nations. When we read about Calais and refugees I kept commenting that we should read about how it is the British that are blocking the refugees from coming, not the French oppressing these people. I was so tired of the Anglo-Saxon Anti-European stance, both from America and the United Kingdom that I moved towards reading French language news sources, just to change perspective. It worked. From Friday to Sunday I spent hours reading article after article to keep up with current affairs. I looked at online conversations. In articles and in social media comments I kept seeing the word democratic used. Brexiters were using that word to tell “Remainers” to just accept the democratic decision by the British people. If the EU referendum had been democratic I would stay quiet. Two aspects make me think that this was an undemocratic process. British Europeans were not allowed to vote unless they were registered to vote in a General election and as long as they had lived in England within the last fifteen years. As I lived in England for five years but between General Elections I did not register to vote. As a result of this I was not allowed to vote, as a European Brit, in the EU referendum. We are at least hundreds of thousands of disenfranchised EU brits. Wouldn’t it make sense for British Europeans to have a say in this, as they have seen the benefits and challenges of being British in Europe?

Flowing Water - A visual experiment is a simple one minute video. The first images were filmed at the Arboretum in the Jura and the timelapses show clouds playing above the Jura near La Dôle. La Dôle is where the doppler radar is located. That radar shows rainfall and precipitation so that air traffic controllers can advise pilots of weather conditions. With the amount of rain that has fallen over the last six or more weeks every river is full of water. As a result of this they are flowing fast and debris can be seen. When rivers flow fast they are fun to watch. The next step would be to capture waterfalls over a period of minutes or hours. If we stopped recording just as the rain stopped we might get interesting results. The peak wouldn’t appear until soon after the rain stopped. I was lucky with these clouds because they moved quickly from one side of the screen to the other. They also formed and dispersed quickly. As a result I could set the interval to take images every few seconds. I could quickly see the result and adjust. When I filmed the clouds I filmed the ground and the trees as they came in and out of the shadow of clouds, I filmed a tighter shot where you could see the transmission mast and then I pointed to the sky and tried to capture the movement of clouds with blue sky as a backdrop. Some moments are fun to watch.

The good weather is finally back. I took this opportunity to go out and film around La Rippe which is on the border between France and Switzerland. From here you can see the Mont Blanc and the Jura. If you look to the South West you can see Geneva’s Jet D’eau and the Salève. I found the first location’s vantage point when I had a day off from work. I don’t remember where I was cycling or driving the scooter but I went up. To get to it you have to head up a steep hill which is good when you’re cycling as it builds up your endurance. It can also be fun on the way down. Now that the weather has improved I have a number of locations that I want to film. I want to experiment both with 360 video and flat video. I want to go to interesting locations and share the highlights with you. The better the weather the easier it will be for me to get the material. I would have ranged further today but as I will be climbing this evening I prefer to preserve that strength and endurance. Tomorrow I can range further. The three sports I would like to focus on this summer are climbing, both conventional and via ferrata, hiking and cycling. Each of these sports is feasible in the landscape around here. Hikes can take you by some spectacular scenery. The challenge will be to decide whether to film with the 360 camera or the conventional one. Time will decide. I can easily carry both cameras but it is always better to focus on one format at a time.

As of the 21st of June, the longest day, the day that Switzerland finally got some sunshine Instagram announced that there are half a billion instagrammers. That’s almost the same number of people who live in the European Union. Half a Billion users are sharing square images of their daily life.

A photo posted by David Azia (@d_azia) on May 7, 2016 at 3:20am PDT

Instagram provides us with windows in to the lives of others.

Time-lapse videos are fun because we can see something happen faster or slower than real time. By watching this content we gain a better understanding of the world and how it works. For years I have been filming time-lapses and the results can be fun. In some cases we record time-lapses with video cameras and at other times we set an interval timer to take pictures every so many seconds. In this post you will be watching clouds form as a 360 timelapse. I have chosen to share both the flat image and the spherical image. The reason for sharing both versions is to give you an overview of how objects move in both.

Yesterday I went for a 360 timelapse walk through the woods above Trelex. I set the camera to take an image every 8 seconds. As the woods were dark and dense it took some effort not to walk in too much mud and not to slip too many times. The result of the timelapse is not as good as I had hoped. Ideally I want to find a way to fix the camera so that it looks at my direction of travel. From this footage you see that the camera suffered with the lack of light and that because the camera occasionally rotated to the right it is easy to become disorientated. It is for this reason that it is useful to find wide open spaces when possible and to find places with a lot of ambient light. What I like about this video is that we can see the various exercise locations. We can see the horizontal bars, the rings and other activities. When I design something to hold the camera steady while I walk with it I can have a little more fun. I could hang on the rings or play with the bars. With a little luck the month and a half of bad weather is coming to an end and I will be able to go out and get to some interesting locations to film some time lapses. There are a number of panoramic locations that I think would lend themselves well to 360° views. Imagine a walk by the lake side or a walk near the summit with a view of the landscape below. What locations or sites would you like to see as 360° timelapse videos?