Tuesday 24 March
Yet another wet and miserable day. This is the longest period of wet weather we
have had since we moved to Spain in 2006.
It is much more like we were used to in the UK, and one of the reasons
we moved here in the first place.
Once again the weather has kept us indoors. So we are even more desperate for something
to keep the boredom at bay. My new task
is to update my large collection of photographs.
I keep copies of all the photographs we have taken on our
walks on the computer. After each walk
I spend half a day sorting through the 30-50 photos I take during the walk, and
selecting 20 for the blog. As I do so I
enhance them, and delete any I don’t want to keep. So for the past few months there is usually
about 20 photographs from each walk.
But previously I didn’t either enhance or weed the
photographs. On instructions from Jan I
immediately deleted any which were not flattering, particularly of her. But apart from that I just kept them all.
So my new project is to go through each file on the
computer, enhance the best and delete the rest. It sounds really boring, but in actual fact
it is really enjoyable. Looking through
the photographs of each walk brings back long forgotten memories of friends we
have not seen for years, and memories I had forgotten.
Jan brought me a cup of coffee in the middle of one such
session, and suggested that I make a video to send to all our walking
friends. In 2018-19 I started making a
video of each year’s walks. It is very
time consuming, and I only got as far as 2012.
I keep intending to take it up again and complete 2013 to 2019. But life gets in the way, and it lingers in
the background.
Wednesday 25 March
But I thought Jan’s idea was an excellent one. It would give me something else to do, and it
would help to cheer up all our walking friends from the Monday Ramblers and the
Thursday explorers
It is about a year since I made the last one, and I had
largely forgotten how to make them.
First I had to select suitable photographs, then I had to transfer them
to my IPad to make the video. This is
because the system I use is not available on PC.
I decided to concentrate on the 18 walks we have done
during January, February and March. It
took a couple of hours to select 80 photographs. It took another few hours to transfer them
to the IPad and make the video. I also
had to select some suitable music for the background. Jan suggested “500 miles” by The
Proclaimers. It is an old favourite,
the theme is suitable for a walking video, and it is a very rousing
recording.
I then have to try to fit 80 photographs into the 3
minutes and 27 seconds that the recording lasts. This is a lot more difficult than it
seems. I have to make sure that each
photo is on the screen long enough to identify, but not too long to be
boring. By hit and miss I reduced the
photographs to 70, and it seemed to work well.
Then I had to upload it to YouTube. I am no expert at this, and it took much
longer than I remembered.
But I finally completed the task, and had a link to the
video on YouTube.
I then sent out an email to all of the 48 members, about
half resident in Spain and the remainder in UK, Holland and Germany.
Jan and I had really enjoyed making the video, and even
more watching the finished product. The
sounds of “500 miles” were heard quite a lot for the remainder of the day.
We were delighted with the response. Most replied by email and were full of
praise for the video, and all said how much it had cheered them up. Most also updated us on what they have been
doing for the past week. It was well
worth the effort, and we are so encouraged we may well do another one next
weekend.
If you would like to see the video you can find it here
No comments:
Post a Comment