Friday, January 8, 2021

Creating My Next YouTube Video

Back in 2003 I had the chance to help sail a boat from Hawaii back to Los Angeles. It had just completed the Transpac yacht race and the owner needed help getting back home. I found out about the trip through a sailing friend and jumped at the chance to participate. During the trip I made sure to take a lot of pictures. Now I am using them to put together my next YouTube video where I describe the trip.

I started the video several months ago but then discovered that nearly all of my photos needed to be edited. When you are on a sailboat, it is difficult to see what is level. Back on land you will look at your photographs and wonder why the horizon is at an angle. Other boats look like they are heading uphill in one shot and downhill in another. The reason is that on a moving boat it is difficult to capture the horizon correctly. Over half of my photos capture the horizon and only a tiny fraction of them have the horizon level in the photo.

As a longtime user of GIMP, I am fairly good at using it to correct photos. Basically I have to rotate the image and crop it. Then I save the new image as a different file to keep the original in case I have to go back and do some more alterations. It takes about 2 minutes per photo and when I realized I had a lot of photos to edit, I got rather discouraged. Last night I set aside several hours and spent my time fixing photographs. Now I am ready to begin actually creating the video.

The moral of this story is that if you ever try to take pictures on a small boat, you will probably need to edit the photos. Otherwise they may look skewed once you see them on land.

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