Suffering The Benz – Page 73 – Once in a while you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right

360 video of the Hockhocking Adena Bikeway

Post author By Bob Benz
Post date July 11, 2016

I’ve been monkeying around with the Theta S vr/360 camera. The still were pretty easy to figure out, but video has been a tad trickier. To get it to render on YouTube, you have to make sure the right metadata is injected into the file so it will render correctly. I think I’m finally getting the hang of the process. Below is about 6 minutes of video I shot while Lara and I were biking home from Little Fish Brewery. The Hocking River is on our right as we ride and the OU campus is on the left.

https://youtu.be/4WIPmf8KSbQ

And here’s another that I shot while we were heading up West Union to Court Street, and then up Court Street.

I’m not really doing any postproduction at this point. Just trying to get them to render on YouTube and Facebook.

Here’s an attempt to upload a still image from the Ricoh site, which I’ve been using to archive my stills. This is a shot I took while resting at the Eclipse Company Town while I was biking from Athens to Nelsonville on the bikeway.

Post from RICOH THETA. #theta360 – Spherical Image – RICOH THETA

Not too thrilled with the resolution on those. And finally, here’s a gratuitous shot of Game One of the Stanley Cup finals. Go Pens!

Stanley Cup Finals, Game 1, Consol Energy Center #theta360 – Spherical Image – RICOH THETA

Tags 360, Hockhocking Adena Bikeway, Theta S, VR

Assorted Bob Fitness Bob

Bike ride to Nelsonville

Post author By Bob Benz
Post date June 16, 2016

I took advantage of a gorgeous morning to ride up to Nelsonville and back on the Adena Hockhocking Bike Trail. This is a quick video of one of my favorite sections. The ride takes you along the Hocking River, the Ohio University Campus, Hocking College and then into Nelsonville. It ranges from sunny stretches to tree-lined stretches like this.

Rode a total of almost 38 miles at an average speed of just over 15 mph. Having a tough time getting the average higher than that.

Tags Adena Hockhocking Bike Path, Athens, Bike, Cycling, Nelsonville

Paddle Bob Uncategorized

Paddling the (water) lilies at Lake Hope

Post author By Bob Benz
Post date June 15, 2016

We’ve had great weather this week, prompting me to do some paddling. I went up to Dow Lake on Monday and paddled the entire thing. On Tuesday, I set of for Lake Hope, about a 30-minute drive from here. It definitely was worth the trip.

I had the entire lake to myself when I put in at about 9 a.m. When I left a few hours later, there were a few other folks getting ready to launch boats and a few kids playing on the beach. Perfect.

I paddled the entire shorelines, passing several gorgeous blue herons. I also saw a few deer along the shoreline. But the highlight of the trip was when I paddled into a cove filled with blooming water lilies. Incredible. It was very shallow, but I managed to get all the way back to the beaver dams.

Paddling across that sea of lily pads was pretty freakin’ cool. Here’s a video that will give you an idea of what it’s like:

This seems to be a pretty shallow lake, and I think they have problems with algae during the heat of summer. My biggest complaint about the trip was finding a decent place to launch. The beach and marina are at the foot of a hill, so I had to drive down to the beach, unload the boat and then carry it over the the marina to launch. There’s a boat ramp on the other side of the dam. Maybe I’ll try there next time, but I wasn’t impressed with the look of it, either.

As an added bonus, the park includes Hope Furnace so I stopped there on my way out. It’s a blast furnace that was used from 1854-74 to smelt iron ore. This part of Ohio was bristling with furnaces like this back in the day. Hope Furnace remains as a strange Industrial Revolution pyramid dedicated to those days …

Tags Hope Furnace, kayaking, Lake Hope, Lake Hope State Park, Lilies