Well, I’ve been working pretty hard, or should I say obsessively, on this new website. At first, I didn’t think I could handle the challenge. I came close to throwing in the towel and go crawling back to the easy-to-use Blogger. But, WordPress seems to be worth the effort and it is definately more powerful, but there is a bit of a learning curve. A big thanks goes to Lucas Howell for helping me work through some code/design issues!

I will be keeping the blogger website since it has all my old posts, and the one disadvantage of going to a premium theme in wordpress is that there’s no easy way to import all my old blogger posts. If I just used a run-of-the-mill wordpress theme then it wouldn’t be a problem, but the reason I switched to wordpress was that I could get a slick design, but that slick design is not compatible with importing Blogger archives.

What I really like is how I can display ‘featured content’ on the slider on the home page and organize things into categories. Want to just quickly get to videos? You can click the ‘Videos’ button at the top or side, or go to the home page and flip through the slider at the top. On blogger, you would have to find a video by scrolling through every single post before you got to it, so this is much better.

To the right you will see these three icons:

You can subscribe with an RSS feed reader like Google Reader (orange button), you can subscribe by getting emails of each post (green button), and/or you can follow me on Twitter (blue button).

These are the three different ways you can stay updated with my posts on this blog. That way you don’t have to constantly check my blog for when it is updated, you’ll be told when it is, so you only visit when you know there are new posts or content. This is much easier than bookmarking this website and having to check every so often to see if there’s anything new. By subscribing you’ll be told when there’s something new, so no wasted time checking!

Chattanooga - on North Shore of walking bridge looking towards the city and Lookout Mountain behind it.

I caught a little time lapse photography yesterday near Coolidge Park as an excuse to play with my Canon 7d . I used a remote timer to set the intervals of the shutter release at about once every 3 seconds.

I put the ISO down to 100 and the aperature as high as I could get it, maybe 32, then the shutter as slow as I could make it, maybe 1/30. I did the former two so I could get the shutter to be as slow as possible. Everything I had read said to try and ‘drag the shutter.’ Luckily, it was overcast yesterday and that helped, otherwise I think I would have needed a neutral density filter that I didn’t have.

Below you can see the Joby Gorillapod at work. I went for a speed run yesterday at Henson’s Gap after the board meeting, and put my camcorder (Canon HF100) out on the sprog with the gorillapod, but I also counter-weighted it on the other wing.

It didn’t affect my flying characteristics, but when I flared it favored and leaned toward that wingtip the camera was on. The trouble of putting it on the sprog is that there is a little play in it, the sprog rotates lengthwise, so the camera was getting shaken alot, looking up and down with each little bump.

It was great fun though – I flew really close to the treetops and was in ground effect on landing for quite a while. There was so much shaking I don’t know if any of the footage will be useful. We’ll see.

This was the outer sprog, and I counter weighted it with some ankle weight on the other wing, this image doesn't show the tie down I had as well.