oldrover
Justified & Ancient
- Joined
- Oct 18, 2009
- Messages
- 4,057
I went into the village of Mumbles this afternoon to do a bit of Christmas shopping as this may be one of the last chances I get this year. As I was pulling in I was lucky enough to be a witness to a bloody good UFO hoax.
I'm not going to bother describing what I saw flying and hovering over the village this afternoon, because while it was obviously something unusual, it was equally obviously someone playing a prank with a supped up quadcopter or similar.
What I did find particularly interesting from a Fortean perspective was what I then did might go someway to answering the often asked question, "why is it that today when everyone's got a camera phone can't anyone get a photo of..."
Well I saw something strange, I did decide to film it and I did have a camera phone. So I pulled over and had a go.
Firstly after safely pulling over it took me at least thirty seconds to find the phone's camera setting after having pretty much waded through the other hundred and one useless functions it's got to offer. And this isn't a flashy phone, it's an old Samsung Galaxy. When I did get to the camera, at which point it was hovering almost directly overhead, I pressed the wrong button and took a photo of the pavement. Only after the photo function reset or whatever it does, and a bit more fiddling did I get to the video facility. By this time of course the thing was flying away toward the sea.
Eventually though I did manage to start filming. I thought I got a few minutes but in fact it was only 40 seconds. In this footage you get plenty of close ups of my hand, a really nice shot of the pavement again and a glimpse of my right boot. I should point out that had I been excited or panicky thinking I was seeing something genuinely weird, it'd probably have taken longer again.
Of the actual time spent with the camera pointed directly at the object, I think only for a fleeting second do you get a tiny little flash of what might have been the object, and I'm not convinced of that. Apart fro this it's a chimney fest, as the phone wasn't able to pick anything else up at all.
To recap then, pulling in safely took a while, patting around your pockets to find the phone or camera takes time. Then getting the thing operational takes quite a long time, even when you're familiar with it. Then add in some fumble time, even if your perfectly calm. And finally allow for the very restrictive technical limitations of the equipment we've most often got to hand.
So as a sort of real life training exercise for gaining footage of something anomalous, I think that this shows unless you've got good quality equipment up and operational you've no bloody chance.
Consider this next time you wonder why someone with an SLR has only taken one photo, or why there aren't more pictures of the yeti*.
* Although not existing is probably a bigger barrier to a good photo.
I'm not going to bother describing what I saw flying and hovering over the village this afternoon, because while it was obviously something unusual, it was equally obviously someone playing a prank with a supped up quadcopter or similar.
What I did find particularly interesting from a Fortean perspective was what I then did might go someway to answering the often asked question, "why is it that today when everyone's got a camera phone can't anyone get a photo of..."
Well I saw something strange, I did decide to film it and I did have a camera phone. So I pulled over and had a go.
Firstly after safely pulling over it took me at least thirty seconds to find the phone's camera setting after having pretty much waded through the other hundred and one useless functions it's got to offer. And this isn't a flashy phone, it's an old Samsung Galaxy. When I did get to the camera, at which point it was hovering almost directly overhead, I pressed the wrong button and took a photo of the pavement. Only after the photo function reset or whatever it does, and a bit more fiddling did I get to the video facility. By this time of course the thing was flying away toward the sea.
Eventually though I did manage to start filming. I thought I got a few minutes but in fact it was only 40 seconds. In this footage you get plenty of close ups of my hand, a really nice shot of the pavement again and a glimpse of my right boot. I should point out that had I been excited or panicky thinking I was seeing something genuinely weird, it'd probably have taken longer again.
Of the actual time spent with the camera pointed directly at the object, I think only for a fleeting second do you get a tiny little flash of what might have been the object, and I'm not convinced of that. Apart fro this it's a chimney fest, as the phone wasn't able to pick anything else up at all.
To recap then, pulling in safely took a while, patting around your pockets to find the phone or camera takes time. Then getting the thing operational takes quite a long time, even when you're familiar with it. Then add in some fumble time, even if your perfectly calm. And finally allow for the very restrictive technical limitations of the equipment we've most often got to hand.
So as a sort of real life training exercise for gaining footage of something anomalous, I think that this shows unless you've got good quality equipment up and operational you've no bloody chance.
Consider this next time you wonder why someone with an SLR has only taken one photo, or why there aren't more pictures of the yeti*.
* Although not existing is probably a bigger barrier to a good photo.
