Cycling the Long way to Upware and back and the magic of Zip-ties

My Marin, which does duty as my main winter bike was nice and clean this morning - the first time in a while, as I had hosed it down last night. The reason was that there were a few things that needed fettling on it. (Speedometer, mudguards, brakes - nothing too important!). Unfortunately I woke with a headache this morning, which is unusual for me and lowers my determination to tackle chores. I ended up spending the morning reading the Sunday papers and by lunchtime feeling quite guilty as the sun was shining and it was almost warm - around 5C.

So I took a couple of paracetamol and wondered what the minimum amount of fettling I could get away with was before setting of into the winter sun. Yesterday I had broken my speedometer - there is a magnet attached to a spoke on the front wheel along with a sensor on the fork which then sends a pulse up to the speedometer on the handlebars for each rotation of the wheel. However the sensor had become dislodged by the huge amounts of gloopy mud I had cycled through and in my determination I had snapped one of the clips on the sensor so that it dangled down into the wheel. Fortunately there was room for a zip-tie to fix it back onto the fork mounting and stop any dangerous dangling. It occurred to me that the broken rear mudguard - its attachment to the rear set stay bridge had finally snapped - could also be secured with a similar zip-tie. After that burst of maintenance I figured the brakes were not too bad for the flatlands and set of up a hill!

I like to be able to keep things going with a bit of fettling in order to extract the maximum benefit before resorting to replacement.

The sun was shining and the sky was blue with one of two interesting clouds in the sky so I decided to head for the nearest - well quite near hill in order to be able to look back down towards Cambridge. I am not sure what the hill is called - the nearest name on the 1:50000 OS map is Allington hill - but it is where the A1305 crosses the A14. You can follow a Bridleway that heads on down to Six Mile Bottom and various directions from there. After yesterday I did not really want any more mud so after stopping to take some pictures I stuck to the road. The sign in the photograph is pointing out the Bridleway. The clouds really did look like that - this picture has been generated from seven pictures and has a soft look, probably because I could not hold the camera still between the pictures being taken.

The same clouds taken from the Swaffham Heath road - on the map this footpath appears to head back over the A14 just after the A14 and A11 combine. I must check it out sometime, I wonder whether they expect walkers to run across the dual carriageway or if there is a tunnel?

A bit further on the Swaffham Heath road at another bridleway, you can see the pylons marching across to the south of Cambridge to an electricity sub-station and Stocking Pelham.

My route took me up where it gets flatter to Upware - near a map contour or 0m - as you can imagine it is easily flooded. I've not taken this picture before, but the sun was so golden that I stopped. The reason I have not taken the shot is because of the telegraph poles crossing the floodwater. This time I made it part of the picture.

When I used Photomatix to combine the seven pictures it complained that not all the pictures had the correct sequence of exposure. I have not gotten to the bottom of the problem yet. But it might be because the sun was so bright that the camera could not take sufficiently fast pictures. As pictures taken afterwards did not cause the same problems. I must try the technique using only three exposures - it would be quicker to process and save storage space. I find that taking pictures is eating up disk space at the moment. A few pictures can easily eat up 1Gb of disk. My picture storage now takes up 170Gb and I am shortly going to scan old pictures and put them on my system which will eat up a whole bunch more space.

I had to take a picture of Baker's Fen alongside Wicken Fen on my way through. Being a Sunday, despite it being quite dark there were quite a few families out walking with dogs and prams and children. A bit more care is required when cycling and I did think that my brakes really were getting a bit weak when a dog jumped out in front and then a youngster - no contact was made though. What I like about this picture is the soft pink - when I had gotten here the sun had set.

I stopped to take a picture on the new bridge crossing Swaffham Bulbeck Lode - by this time it was quite dark and I had both front lights and a rear light on. I rested the camera on the bridge to hold it stable when taking the pictures. The longest exposure was for 3.2seconds. The resulting picture does have the right feel - although it appears lighter than it really was.

By the time I got home it was quite dark - but my headache had gone and the bike had held up - I really must replace the brakes blocks though.

What a Difference A Day Makes

It amazes me how quickly you can sense a change in the weather - one minute we were being warned about another freezing and snowing week and then a thaw set in and was quickly noticeable. When I cycled on Saturday I found the roads and tracks I cycled on really challenging and even with concentration I "fell off" - although onto my feet. In fact it was bad enough that I was put off from cycling on Sunday. This morning loads of the snow had gone. I had calls in the morning and late afternoon evening so I decided to pop out for a lunchtime ride. Given all the food I have consumed over Christmas it as the healthy and needed option.

It was a quick ride around the Fens and along some of the droves. Here is the same stretch of pavement/cycle path between Lode and Swaffham Bulbeck. The picture on the left was taken on Saturday the one on the right today at Lunchtime. Although it was warmer the sky was gloomy though.

As part of my HDR photograph experiments I took a picture from the bridge crossing the Swaffham Bulbeck Lode - it was quite dull and so I was interested to see if HDR would lift the picture or not. I took this with a 7 shot bracket holding the camera against the frame of the bridge. It has produced a better result than I expected.

I am still using the trial copy as you can see the Photomatix watermark - but I will probably buy it tomorrow. There also appear to be websites offering 15% off coupons. Apparently people who work for Adobe and Apple can get a copy for free. NO LONGER USING THE TRIAL COPY - watermarks removed.

This was taken from the same bridge but looking down the other way. It appears that the burnt out car has not been moved. It is nicely atmospheric though. The one problem that I can deal with in Photoshop Elements is the vignetting - you can see darker bits at the corners. Updated - I have used PSE to lighten the corners using the "clone" tool. The Vignetting fix did not have the degree of control I needed.

The other lessons learnt are that it is quite hard hand-holding the camera whilst it takes 7 pictures. At the moment I am taking each picture as the maximum resolution JPG and RAW formats and sometimes the data takes so long to write to the memory card that it stalls taking more pictures in the sequence. The other challenge is that with the wind some objects move around and so blur in the pictures. The middle picture also had some swans in it but they seem to have been processed out.

A Cycle Ride to gather pictures to test out HDR Photography

A quick bit on the Cambridge Guided Busway - it was reported in the Local TV news that the opening is not too far off which is good to hear. I was also amazed to get (for my blog anyway) a large number of hits on that particular post. I am not sure why, but it did make me look around for a bit more information and I found the Cambridgeshire County Council website to be very informative. There are maps including one of the Fen Drayton Lakes - which names the various lakes around Fen Drayton.

Despite the problems the rest of the UK seems to be having with the snow and ice we have yet to get more snow - although we have been warned. The temperatures are low - but the paths I cycle on are getting better - mind you you still have to take care.

The work along the Bottisham Lode seems to be progressing with the bank being worked upon.

The skies were quite dramatic - I wonder if those are snow clouds? I have been experimenting with HDR photography. (High Dynamic Range). To be fair I have just started to experiment. When a camera takes a picture I cannot deal with a huge range of light and dark so that in this picture in order to show the sky the ground is black - it has been under-exposed. It is possible to take several pictures with different amounts of exposure and then combine the best bits to show more detail throughout the picture.

So far I have set my camera to automatically take three pictures of the same scene with different amounts of exposure. I have yet to try to combine them. I have set it to take three pictures of +/-3 stops as well as the correct exposure. My first impression is that perhaps that is not enough - but I will first check out the re-combinations first.

This is Baker's Fen - I took a few multiple exposure pictures - a shame the cloud obscured the sunset - but an interesting test for HDR.

A couple of posts ago I mentioned that had a theory that my feet were getting cold before the rest of me because of the metal cleats in the boots leaking heat into the pedals. Well I have been cycling in ordinary (non-cleated) boots and my feet have still been getting pretty cold.