When I came to this area years ago I thought CT Beach was in reference to an actual beach, with sand, and was confused in that the place resembled nothing of the sort. There's a boat ramp leading to the water of Hills Creek Reservoir, which in the winter is a very long ramp because the water is drained low to accommodate heavy stream run off. What's left are steep and muddy, stump-covered banks surrounding the lake. In the summer, when the lake is full, it is surrounded by brush. So what's with the name, CT Beach? I eventually learned "Beach" was not a description of the picnic / boat launch area but is the initials and last name of the first Forest Ranger in these parts, Charles T Beach.
I experimented with various camera-mounting angles, stopping occasionally to adjust. On day one I realized my mistake of adding additional plastic hinges to the camera (for rotational options) because the lengthy extension exaggerated Harley Davidson's traditional vibrations when idling.
Though activating the camera with it's remote control (dangling around my neck) does work, it is difficult with gloved hands. Ideally, I'd like to start and stop the camera in one-minute bursts but ended up letting the camera run much longer, resulting in heavy duty cuts during editing.
Editing also included mixing clips of the different angles in hopes to minimize monotony. As a final touch I needed music with some semblance of motion / rhythm, and settled on two blues tunes from "Lazy Lester" called "Lester's Stomp" and " Ponderosa Stomp".
Day two's video lacks color because of overcast sky. I rode to the same place in hopes of gathering additional angles to include in one "merged video" of both days, but the lack of color and different lighting hardly makes the effort worthwhile. It wouldn't look natural.
(I can imagine the difficulty in trying to obtain different angles of view during the trip, which would require frequent stopping, dismounting, adjusting, etc.)
Slower-paced music was selected for day two ..... Floyd Cramer's version of "Georgia On My Mind," which it will be in a couple of months.
Actually, my Smugmug site renders a better video than Vimeo or Youtube, at least in the "full screen" mode it doesn't lose as much resolution as the other two. The drawback is that Smugmug only offers a "link" here, not a picture of the video to click on.
Click This Smugmug Link
Neither does Smugmug show a "thumbnail" of the video at its own site. Because there is a fade-in transition set at the begining of each video, they appear as blanked out screens. By clicking on the center, a start button should appear. All these little inconveniences add up to Smugmug's version, though better quality, not being handy to use in the blog.
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