Still Slacking

As part of my plans for getting a few bits of video I can use as B-roll during my course and on videos I am producing for release over the next few weeks I visited Sedgley Beacon again today. I say again because I popped over on Monday after a nice walk down the canal at Wombourne only to find the weather was finally catching up with me and the wind bitter and too gusty to film.

Finding lost souls

This is a fantastic spot that I don't consider part of my patch but it overlooks pretty much everything I do. I generally only go there when I want to experience long uninterrupted views which often means days I'm playing with radios and not cameras but there is quite a lot of bird life up there and you can see for miles on a clear day making things like Red Kites visible circling around farmland. For up close stuff it's generally not as good as other spots in the area. One of Dudley's other hill based Geo-sites at Wren's Nest has wonderful views of the bits of Dudley and south shaded by the hills of Dudley, much better close up bird life and even more fossils falling out of the ground and Baggeridge Country Park down the beacon a couple of miles is a former colliery with great environments including patches of ancient woodland that runs all the way to Himley Hall and it's former gardens and pools. So they tend to grab my attention when I'm driving this way looking for something interesting.

One thing I did find however was the lens cap I lost on Monday. Exactly where I thought it would be and none the worse for spending 36 hours that included everything from 15 degrees C down to sub zero, gail force winds and snow/hail/rain in every combination known to man in short heavy bursts. So that is good :)

No photo's

I didn't take any photo's at all while I was there even though I had my camera. Instead I used it to look into the distance at things I saw. I'd have been better off bringing my bins but you can't take a photo if you don't have your camera with you so I don't regret having it with me.

Videos

All the videos I took are in landscape format with a static locked off camera looking in various directions. One covers my patch and will probably be useful for showing relationships but shows pretty clearly the amount of green in The Black Country and West Midlands particularly along canals, rail, roads and on former brown field sites. You can also see right into South Staffs (well pretty much on the door step here), Staffs, Cheshire and Derbyshire (on the edge). I also think it will be pretty useful showing how flat the area is when I talk about the lost landscapes of our swampy past.

Another is taken south(ish) and includes the Clee Hills, Malvern Hills and Clent Hill, showing the view out over the West Midlands, Warwickshire, Worcestershire, Shropshire and down into Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, and Wales. This section is the most pastoral of the views from the beacon. Showing just how close the countryside comes to the cities although the patchwork of fields nearby are for horses. The clouds cast some great shadows over the landscape here so this will probably get reused as b-roll for years. Or at least until I upgrade to something that shoots 4k.

A third was taken pointing towards The Wrekin and includes the distant Welsh Mountains, Stiperstones and Clee Hills right on the left edge (maybe out of frame here but inframe on video two) is Pen-y-fan one of the best mountains in South Wales. It is probably only a few pixels on the HD video but via the camera I could see a shady pointed peak in the right spot 75 miles or so away.

Another couple of videos were taken towards Birmingham City centre the first was so I could show the majority of The Black Country and the West Midlands in a single frame (although the bit containing Coventry will be a few pixels hiding behind Brum), mostly because I wanted to point out the massive nature reserves between here and there I visit from time to time to remind folks that even in the darkest, most industrial parts of the country and hundreds of acres of wild waiting to be explored.

The second video I took that includes Brum was a shot that includes the 1846 astronomical observation tower that replaced the former Neapolitan beacon and the two radio towers next to it with Brum over their shoulder. I think this is a nice visual to talk about the history of the spot in the future but it was also shot almost into the sun with some great clouds so it will probably get used a lot sped up as b-roll.

Site News

As for wider site news. I made a couple of changes to the tagging system today and the formatting of tags when they appear on the site. This should mean several improvements going forward. The first of which is the first post now appears in the ND category. The site will never be finished (nor in a state that it's codebase is shareable unfortunately) but I'm not planning on making any breaking changes. One of the big advantages of developing with a system that creates a static site from my data is I'm never going to have to make security changes or be prompted by politics in a bit of software I use to move away from it. The backend is never exposed and I don't even have to upgrade it if that becomes problematic.