Technology played a key role before, during, and after this trip. It was not only a question of having been there and done that, but also one of preparing the spoils for showing afterwards. Therefore it was sobering on many occasions to see how close I came to Wallace’s tragedy.
Photography took centre stage for the documentation, and this meant that the hacking software CHDK had to be running; but in December 2012, I was dismayed to ascertain that the version for the SX120 was so poorly maintained that it was unworkable. Fortunately I had an older version which still ran, and, after emailing a few of the characters involved, managed to get it back on track. True, I would have liked to have done a sunset on Stewart Island, but the script I had prepared was not going to work, and until I could work with the laptop again, there was no means of editing it.
Then the mysterious dead or bad pixels turned up, triggering a complete rethink of the postprocessing procedure to avoid the appearance that I had spilt hundreds and thousands over the landscape. My dear, of all the raw processing programs out there only RawTherapee did a halfways reasonable job of this; but the documentation is so poor that it is very much hit and/or miss.
Most of the postprocessing runs over ImageMagick via its incarnation with PHP. But again it is the lack of documentation and the lack of maintenance that makes me worry. PHP’s version Imagick seems to be frozen in time in the late 00s; and if it is not actively maintained may well be dumped. It’s hard enough to obtain compiled versions of IM and PHP’s interface for it that actually work as it is; and an up to date version of them with all the current capabilities of IM (including Fourier transformations) would be great – or might just be a footnote in history.
Even with the photos in the bag, videofying them proved another daunting task. Automating this was the key; but ffmpeg’s – the only program capable of automation – documentation is again just so much used toilet paper. I can get something to work, yeah, but that’s not the point; and then AVS4you’s Video Editor decides that this is all too much for the price and packs in (“program not responding”).
I am glad that I have a camera and a gps logger that operate on batteries – for a little extra weight, I can carry a sufficient supply for 10 days. But looking around for successors for these reveals that very few use batteries any more; the absolute bane are, of course, those with inbuilt power sources; on the track not usable for more than about a day. I just wonder – if there are any wildernesses left for future generations – how those generations will document their adventures. Technology enough they will have.
I sometimes wonder, why bother? I could look at some simple snapshots taken with a cellphone that lasted a day; I could look at an outdated map and ask, did the track not go to the left here? Or I can view my thousands of pictures and know where each one was taken; and I can fly over a map that I made because I gathered the data on my own two feet.
And that is all the difference.
