More on photography and nature.....

Well, the picture snapping is going fairly well. I've taken a liking to snapping wild birds, they bring a lot of pleasure in pictures.

I also had a real nightmare with the local squirrel population; I wanted to feed the birds to attract more to shoot photos of, and the squiggs just wanted to eat the feeders I was using. They won't share feed with each other, never mind with other species, well, that's vermin for you I guess.

I've had quite a bit of hassles with finding a reliable supplier for bird feeding stuff, and that's documented at my End User blog, which you can get to from the link in the side bar up there on the right.

If the squirrels don't knock it off or shape up, it looks like the only way is going to be to cull them. It's up to them really. Vermin have far fewer choices or chances than other creatures. It's harsh, but who ever said it would not be, after all that's how life is for every living being.

Changing times...

I'm doing a whole lot more with photography now that it looks like MF has been abandoned by it's author. There's little or no point making models for a sim that looks set to stagnate.

I have an album of sorts here. Hope you like looking at the pics; the menu is pants, but that's photobucket for you. You'll have to select which year, and then which month.

I've switched ISPs lately and am now finally free of the truly dreadful Pipex once and for all thankfully; I really though it might never end, and that was making me very miserable indeed.

Once I get myself sorted at the new home I'll see about getting a half decent album interface on line if that's at all possible.

A walk in the park

I got out of my cell today and manged to get as far as the local park.

I took the new camera for a try out in the first actual half way proper sunshine we've had since mid December. This thing is not half bad, just the faintest whiff of an actual sun ray and it's off like a lunatic, playing with light.

I shall try again soon and take a tripod next time as that water is just asking to get shot a bit more. I cropped this out of one of the images I got today, I think I can see more photo snapping and less sim flying ahead for me for some time to come.

Fighting off the crazees...

In the real world, we very often measure directions in degrees, If you go to google earth and look at an airport, and check out the end of a runway it will almost always be marked with the reciprocal heading for that runway. Some are not marked, but they are rare. We start with 0 for North and proceed around in a clockwise fashion adding to the degrees, so East is 90 and South 180 and West 270. Everyone knows what's going on, and it works because it's nice and simple like that.

In micro flight the author has seen fit to measure the directions in radians when it comes to placing scenery objects, and he uses them in an anti-clockwise manner, and has made East=0! Damn fool that he is.

So here's a rational solution to planting things in MF for all us normal people out here. If you click on it, you'll get it full size and can then save the image as a handy reference. It took a lot of concentration to convert it all using google's claculator and macromedia's fireworks to paint it all up, and it is always possible I will have messed up somewhere, but I think it's probably just fine. Let me know if you spot something wrong, just post a comment here to do that.

Hope it helps; Now anyone can quite simply plant a runway in MF scenery at the very least, despite the author of MF's considerable efforts to prevent it happening. ;O)

Slightly more down to Earth

I felt like tinkering with a building that was not air related, it also struck me that it might be fun to explore house design a little bit. I found it harder at first than one might imagine, but it's looking fair for just an evening's work. I'm still not quite sure how one or two building conventions work, but I'll get it figured out in time I guess.

New Micro Flight blog created

OK, so we are having a new blog for MF content providers.

You can go there from this link. Seems to be a cross between a web page and a forum really, not bad I guess. We shall have to see if it feels comfy enough for & after a while.

At least they have sheduled outages on this host, I really don't mind that sort very much at all. I prefer that it is at least being maintained and looked after on a pretty regular basis.

There's also a link in the sidebar.

Airfield

It all started with a model of the tower at Cranfield for MF, and somehow or other I've ended up making a few more of the buildings there. So, since I'm not all that inclined to fly in MF anymore, then I may as well try and model even more if not all of it, it's better than wasting all those hours of building that have gone into it to date. It's a huge undertaking of course and I doubt I'll ever get it all done in my lifetime, as there's rather a lot of it, and I'm just one bloke.

It's loosely based on EGTC, a field not too far from me. Over time I'll catch the essence of the differences in the 4 main hangars there, but it's a long job as they all have differing door arrangements these days, they all started out pretty much the same I'd imagine, but over time, they've all become rather more individual, which is of course a bit of an extension of the model makers nightmare. They don't even have the same glazing spec, so that makes it even more challenging to model.

I'm having to guess a lot too, drawings for a standard UK WW2 C Type hangar so far have eluded me. Airliners.net have proven handy for a fair number of pictures of EGTC, but most people take pictures of only the planes, and miss out on the airfield and it's fittings. I dream dreams of being able to go there with a digital camera, there would be some planes in the resulting pics (of course!), but mostly I'd have memory cards full of buildings!