I love this affect of seeing trees from overhead, how everything splays out from the center.

Here are some of the images I took from my two hour flight today at Mount Woodside. It was a great little flight. Mainly ridge soaring.

The highlights were playing in the clouds, watching a family of eagles fly around, flying around with them, seeing two eagles grab their talons and tumble together, and meeting new pilots and flying a new site. I love any site that lets you see or fly over some water and this one has a gorgeous view of a river convergence.

Since my car wasn’t able to make it up the mountain I had to leave all my expensive camera gear behind and I just used my old trusty Canon PowerShot SD870 for these shots. I used this same camera to win my first YouTube contest back in the day too: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nZfJjRrEb4

Launch is to the right in the photo.

A Bald Eagle going into the clouds.

My favorite moment from today, even though I felt like the ugly duckling trying to keep up with them.

My second favorite moment.

The scenery from this site is terrific.

Always enjoy finding terrain like this while flying. It's like looking at a painting . . . while flying a hang glider.

The first video is from this year’s Flytec race in Florida, and the second one is from 2009′s race (on a day off from racing). There are more photos from this year’s trip at my tumblr blog. Oh, and the music I made in Garage Band.

Around 1:15 in the above video, I was freaking out. Or, I guess I should say, I had just been freaking out and was now relieved. Before gaining this much altitude, there was no good place to land, it was all swamp, and the high winds were pushing me into them and I was only at about 1,400′.

Then I saw a bird turning and raced to it and caught the thermal he was in and saved it!

That thermal drifted with the wind, and me, over this unlandable terrain, but luckily I was safely in a thermal. I was not about to loose track of it and fall out of the thermal over this area.

I looked below me and was happy I wasn’t in these person’s shoes (see the photo). They had drifted over this area fairly low. The day before a pilot had landed in a swamp and gotten chased by an alligator, at least that’s what the story was. So I was happy to be up in a thermal climbing, and not down low sweating.

Luckily, the pilot in the photo made it out of that area, but that’s the risk they chose to take, that’s competition flying.

Below is a video from the previous year’s competition in Florida. The winds were to strong to compete so we went off to find some fun. The day before I shot this short video, we had been on another windy day off and were soaring an abandoned hotel on the beach, see that video here.

I also just made a playlist on YouTube so all my hang gliding videos can be grouped, viewed, and shared all together. Here’s the link to the playlist:
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=1B350C54D54B3C57

Okay, now here’s some ham boning . . .




Most overused line in Cinema: “You look like shit”




Good advice:




I love hang gliding – if you press play it skips to my favorite part of the video:

I have recently been through a divorce, which led me to move back to my hometown of Bowling Green, KY in July. That’s why I haven’t posted much about hang gliding on this site since then. For several months the things that used to be fun, weren’t any more, so I haven’t been doing much flying. I’ve been hitting the reset button on life a little and trying to regroup and move forward.

Since my move home, I have created a couple more videos for Sewanee (here), filmed my first wedding, and photographed my first wedding. From this wedding work I started to get booked for several weddings around my hometown for 2011. It seemed as though I could start a business here in my hometown and start down that path, but something was pulling at me . . .

Vancouver - photo from http://frogbox.com/blog

District 9 came out last year and is definitely one of my favorite movies. I liked it even more when I heard about the director, Neill Blomkamp. He is a graduate of the Vancouver Film School’s (VFS) 3D Animation and Visual Effects program, which is probably a contributing factor of why that program is full a year in advance. His several short films (here and here) caught the attention of Peter Jackson (Lord of the Rings trilogy director), who went on to produce his District 9 movie.

All of Blomkamp’s recent success started with his degree from VFS (near the bottom of THIS interview he mentions it). Every year, VFS graduates do amazing things in movies like Wall-E, Iron Man, Twilight, The Dark Knight and many other feature films (here and here). They also land jobs at the big visual effects houses and game developers (there’s a 98% job placement rate after graduation from this program).

So, despite their 3D/Visual Effects program being full until October 2011, I gave the VFS admissions counselor a call (whom I’ve been in contact with over the last two years). I thought, maybe I could start their Film Production program instead, which has open seats. The idea being, I’m ready to start a new chapter in my life and if the 3D/Vfx program is full, then the Film Production program will just have to do because I’m ready for a change.

The admissions counselor proceeded to tell me that she just got out of a meeting where a student had dropped out of the upcoming 3D/Vfx program, which means a spot is open . . .

That was all I needed, I started doing all the research and budgeting. I sent them the link to my winning HP video which got me accepted into the program and a week after having the conversation with the admissions counselor I had gotten my loans in order and will be attending the 3D/Visual Effects program at VFS this January!

Right now, I’m looking for a place to live in Vancouver. I found a very generous fellow pilot to store my glider up there, so I’ll be able to fly while I’m there, thanks Jim. And I’ve already had a warm welcome on their forum – just can’t say enough good things about the hang gliding and paragliding community. Their sites look absolutely breath-taking too. Their most popular launch, Mt. Woodside, is about an 1h30m drive away from the city.

[box]Click, drag, and release on the image for a panorama of Mt. Woodside launch [See post to watch QuickTime movie] (by Stewart Trowsdale) [/box]

Vancouver has been consistently ranked as one of the most livable cities in the world as well as having one of the highest quality of living rankings in the world (here). But for those reasons it is also one of the more expensive cities to live in. If any one has any good ramen noodle recipes, I’m all ears, because I’m going to be living as frugal as possible.

I’m not sure what this will mean for my blogging frequency when school starts, but I will try and keep it updated and definitely post if I make any cool stuff, or updates on projects I’m working on. I’m really excited about this new chapter in my life, about moving forward and learning new, exciting things I have an interest in.

I know even mentioning the fact I have been through a divorce here will meet with the disapproval of some people, and that’s fine. Like many difficult times in life there seems to be a societal and cultural stigma that you should suffer in silence, and I can even understand that to some degree. I had one person tell me it was ‘inappropriate’ to change my relationship status on facebook from ‘married’ to ‘single’ . . . So everyone has their own standards, I thought that one was extreme though.

I know there are some other blogs that go into great detail about their divorces and how they are dealing with it daily. That is right for some people and helps them cope. I only mention it here because I feel it would be dishonest to the people who actually take the time to follow what I’m doing and read my blog, if I at least did not mention it.

My friends and family have been the absolute most important thing to me getting through this and I genuinely appreciate all of their support, and if those people are reading this, thank you.

[box]Here’s an example of a vfx test piece I made about a year ago that is created using a motion matching program that determines the physical camera position based on the parallax of the scene, and recreates the cameras 3-dimensional movements in software. With that camera position data you can place a 3D model within that live-action footage and it will appear as though it lives in that scene. I created the floating orb for this test and put it in the footage. This is a small scale version of how visual effects in movies are made:[/box]

PS – Next week, one year will have passed since I started lucasridley.com, so I’ll be posting some statistics about how many visitors I’ve had over the last year.

Incredible concept – hypnotize people to think the camera is a loved one to get genuine reactions for the photograph




Entertaining idea – must have taken forever to make this




Hilarious:

Shows what can happen when you mess up doing hang gliding aerobatics, and this turned out well in the sense the pilot was not badly injured:




Ansel Adams, the legend:




Can’t decide if this guy is nuts or a genius:




Do NOT watch if you’re afraid of heights:

This is a quick little video I threw together of the couple of flights that I actually set up my camera on over the last few months. It’s typically such a pain to set a camera up on my glider, in addition to the stress of usually when I do want to set one up it’s because I’m doing something a bit over the line like a speed run or aerobatics, so then I don’t want to throw another factor into that mix. So for these couple of clips I’ve taken over the last few months I’ve had many more similar flights to these that I didn’t capture.

I’ve started to spin my glider, get a little more over the top on wingovers, and am really enjoying early morning speed runs very close to the treetops (watch my shadow in the video).

The video was made using my gorillapod on my keel with my Canon 7D, and another mount that I set up using a fisheye on my Canon HF100, see a picture of that mount on my other blog. I’m not too keen on fisheyes because they distort the image so much it makes trees that I’m inches away from look like they’re many feet away, so it’s hard to get a grasp on what is really happening when you watch things through a fisheye.

I will be moving soon so this may be my last hang gliding-related video for a while, hope you enjoy.

I just rotated this image from the video so you can see what it looks like if the horizon is oriented properly to my position.

So we decided to try for Mount Elbert which is the tallest mountain in Colorado at 14,433′. We spent the night close to the trailhead in the well established camping area of the San Isabel National Forest. We woke up early to start up the standard route, the Northeast Ridge.

It was beautiful hiking, up until we were postholing through snow near the treeline at 12,000′. It was really slow going through that area. Carson even resorted to ‘ninja rolling’ to get through the terrain, which means he looked like he was practicing the stop, drop, and roll. Punching through the snow with almost every step, up to your hip, was exhausting and felt like you were falling through a trap door every time because it happened so quickly.

The rest of the hike was gorgeous. We only saw two other people all day. On the way down I decided to try some glissading which you can see in the video was a ton of fun (and by my crazy laugh). I think it probably took about 9 hours of hiking roundtrip, including rests.

We also went and saw the Great Sand Dune National Park and we also headed over to Golden, CO and I got to check out the flying launch there, which is also named Lookout Mountain. Wish I had brought my gear for flying, next time I will. We also got to see JB Smoove in stand up in Denver, he’s probably most famous for THIS scene in a Curb Your Enthusiasm episode.

The crew with Elbert in the background

Follow the yellow br... I mean sign

Carson trying to get out of a posthole and Eric mocking him by walking away.

Just out of the treeline.

Carson.

Eric.

Summit.

Leaving the summit in our dust.

Shortly after this steeper section we started glissading

Watch your step.

BJ Herring climbing out.

Liftoff.

Great Sand Dunes National Park

This is a very short promotional piece for hang gliding I wanted to do. It’s just something very simple that I thought might stir some interest in people.

I used old footage from when I was making my Nikon Festival Contest video and color corrected in an interesting way to me using Magic Bullet Looks. All the footage used came out of my Canon HF100 too.

I also posted this to my new Youtube account LucasRidley. I thought it would be easier for people to remember than my other account, alta8bird. So I thought I better make the switch before I get any more subscribers. It’s really something I’ve been putting off because I’m afraid none of my current subscribers will make the switch.

The name alta8bird came from my first AOL account a long, long time ago and when I signed up for Youtube in 2007, I thought, eh, what’s this thing, Youtube? I’ll just use that random name I had back in the day . . . even though I really didn’t like it, it’s not memorable, and I don’t think I’m doing myself any favors by keeping it if I’m planning on posting more videos to youtube, plus everything else I have, like this website, vimeo, twitter, etc. is in my own name too.

So you can click HERE to subscribe to my new Youtube account, I hope to post a video weekly, but we’ll see . . .

Thanks for watching!

Avatar came out while my wife was on a trip to Haiti, and since I promised to see it with her, I waited. And waited. It was an epic adventure that rivaled the movie itself. Well, maybe not, but it was hard waiting. It had been out almost two weeks by the time I saw it, not to mention the time we went to the theater with her family over Christmas. [edit: the shorter version is now in the player above, if you want to see the longer version of this video goHERE Thanks!]

My wife and I were the first in line of our family to buy tickets. I had the tickets in my hand! That was a done deal! I was going to see Avatar finally! BUT, I had purchased the last tickets so the rest of her family wouldn’t be able to go. So I held back the tears as I got a refund and thought, I’m never going to see this movie. My commitment to family was really tested that night.

Well, the time came and we eventually saw it. My palms were so sweaty during the flying scenes I got dehydrated! Or it could have been the fact I refused to drink water until the family agreed to go back and try and see it again? Anyway, I knew that I had to do a spoof video related to hang gliding. It was just too perfect.
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You're going down Scott - I pretended he had to land because I shot his glider, but really he had to land because . . . it's a glider. I think I started to like the costume too much at this point.

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But it was one of those thoughts you have and think I ‘should’ do that. Like checking your oil when filling up at the gas station but you’ve just bought two delicious ice cream snickers bars while your car was filling up and your brain can’t fathom putting them down for something that you ‘should’ be doing. Well, my ice cream snickers bars this time was my apathy towards the effort it would take to create such a video, but I sat it aside like two melting ice cream snickers bars on a hot summer day and I went for it and I did what I thought I ‘should’ do, and I made an avatar spoof (confused yet by the metaphor? me too, I just like ice cream snickers bars).

If I could just wrastle some more help from my friends Scott and Eric for another video endeavor I thought “I could do this.” With Eric’s horrible acting skills, Scott’s ability to paint my face, and their combined experience and expertise in making fun of me, they were perfect for the job. And lucky for me, agreed to do it.

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Eric (left) and Scott (right) were really commited to this job. They even put in overtime and kept making fun of me after the shooting for the video was done. Now that's commitment! But what are friends for? No, seriously, what are friends for? I'm beginning to think I have a distorted definition of friend.

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Normally, I will storyboard something out and get everything just right, but in that area I picked up those ice cream snickers, devoured them, and threw the wrappers on the floor. I took a different approach so the footage might seem more natural. I had a general idea of what I wanted the outcome to be and a couple specific references to the movie, but other than that nothing was written out so everything would seem more natural. Scott and Eric did a good job playing along considering I didn’t really fill them in a lot on all my ideas.

One challenge was giving it that documentary and ‘The Office’ -look with only three people because the camera would be stationary on the tripod any time we’re all three in the shot. But it seemed to work out and get that natural feel as we traded off each being cameramen so we’d get that little camera shake.
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Me jumping on Eric's glider. This was one of those shots where you only have one chance to get it right and we were lucky enough to do just that.

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Getting the costume together was half the battle. I had to go buy the longest wig I could and braid it myself. My wife called while I was doing it and I couldn’t pick up the phone. That was one of the weirdest excuses I’ve ever had to miss a call. Oh, and don’t ever expect to find blue lipstick anywhere if it’s not halloween, I probably visited like 5 different stores and couldn’t find it. I actually made an iron-on tshirt that says “Let’s make Tsahaylu under the Tree of Voices,” with the image of the movie poster below that. My character was going to wear that, but I scrapped it at the last minute because I thought it would clash with trying to look nerdily identical to the real movie characters.
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We shot this in my front yard (thanks for Kurt's help too). My Vietnam vet neighbor thinks I'm crazy now though.

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All in all it took about 4 or 5 hours to film and a little over a full day of editing to put together. I’m going to make another short little video of outtakes and other funny stuff I didn’t use too. I’m hoping this video will garner a lot of views, a similar Avatar spoof video got 800,000 views in it’s first week. I couldn’t imagine getting that many views, but you never know. Pass it around to friends and family and it might get there, you never know until you try.

So put down whatever your excuse is for that project you’ve always thought you should do, and go after it! You just might want to avoid that project involving having your friends make fun of you or you might end up in tears that are soaked in blue body paint running down your face. I mean, I’m just saying, not from experience or anything, just a word of caution.

But seriously I think it went great and appreciate everyone’s help from Eric and Scott, to Kurt, Rex, James, Mike B, Jen, and George for showing their support (James had that cameo at the end, hope your eye is better . . .) to the guy who took a picture of me on his cell phone as he drove by to let me know I was doing something special. And thanks to my wife who not only puts up with these random ideas but supports me. So share this video around to everyone you know, I’d really like to see how many views I can get out of this thing, and I think it is an interesting way to expose people to the sport of hang gliding who might not every look for it.

(Everything was shot on my trusty Canon 7D)
Don’t forget to check out my photoblog: http://lucasridley.tumblr.com
And the new clothing I started making: http://borntofly.spreadshirt.com

Oh and if you do the Digg thing too, then Digg this video: http://digg.com/movies/Avatar_Goes_Hang_Gliding

And most definitely subscribe to my Youtube videos!

If that’s not enough . . . don’t forget to brush your teeth either!

I’ve always wanted to make my own t-shirts, so I stopped wanting and started doing! There is only one design up right now, but after 10 products are bought I can upload 5 more designs that I already have ready to go!

These shirts will be for both hang gliding and paragliding, you can use the drop down menu on the shirt’s website that says “All products” to pick between hang gliding and paragliding shirts, hoodies, bags, and tank tops. If there’s some kind of clothing that you’d like to buy, like having a long sleeve shirt or for you crazy college girls, something written across the butt of some shorts, just make a comment here and I’ll make it for you.

This isn't your Grandma's computer print-out iron-on t-shirt. These designs will not fade with time, and don't look hokey like those home-made shirts. This is the real deal. (sorry Grandma, just trying to make a point.)

These are your typical digital print iron-on’s either. These designs will last! No ink’s are used in the design so it won’t fade. See the pictures below for some close-ups! Pictured are the organic Vintage-style shirt and the Organic Men’s Jersey Tee. Both are super soft, I’m wearing the Jersey Tee right now, right out of the shipping bag and it feels great! The Vintage-style feels soft like an old t-shirt, very comfortable.

Close up of the Organic Men's Jersey Tee collar, it's soft around the neck.

Close up of the Organic Vintage-style collar. Here you can get an idea of the light-weightness of this style shirt.

Vintage-style shirt full shot of design.

Organic Jersey Tee full shot of design.