Without doubt the highlight of our time in Turkmenistan was the night we spent next to the Darvaza gas crater. Darvaza is situated bang in the centre of the country, about 250km north of Ashgabat, and is the product of Soviet gas exploration gone badly wrong. In 1971, while drilling for gas, the ground under the rig collapsed leaving a huge crater with a diameter of 70 metres. To stop poisonous gases escaping they decided to set the crater on fire (very Russian thing to do…), with some clever little Russian predicting the fires would burn out in a couple of days. Well, somebody obviously got their calculations a little wrong as 41 years later the fires are still burning strong! I’ve captioned some of the pictures and there is a short video at the bottom to show you what the landscape was like and what awful music we had to put up with in the car…
Our half way pit stop
The current Turkmen President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov watches over us as we eat
Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov cutely decorated with tinsel
Our Russian driver, Dima. For the trip into the desert he donned the full camo...
The Darvaza gas crater, which was only meant to burn for a few days, still burning away 41 years later
.
.
Dima cooking us some great Shashlik (kebabs)
.
No Comments »
I’ve been meaning to play around with the video on my camera for a while but never really got round to it. I much prefer making stills at the moment so I find it hard to force myself to try video. Anyway I went down to rowing on Saturday with the aim of shooting just video. The light was great and I would’ve loved to have shot stills but I made myself persevere. I’d read about the basic rules to do with dslr video a while ago so I was ok on the technical front. The only thing I found tricky was focusing in such bright light, you could hardly see the lcd screen so half the video wasn’t sharp which was a shame. It was really foggy when I got there about 7.30 but by the time we were on the water the sun had burnt through which was a shame; the light was still great mind. So all the video was shot on a 7D with a 16-35, 50 and 70-200 lens. Pretty hard keeping the longer lenses stable in the launch so didn’t use them much.
I edited the entire thing in imovie. It was the first time I’d used it and it was a breeze to use. Everything was easy to pick up and although its by no means a complicated edit, it was pretty simply to make. So here’s what I’ve put together using the footage from Saturday morning. It’s work in progress more than anything as I’ll keep going back to shoot more footage and hopefully put something more cohesive and impressive together in the future. I converted everything to b+w as I just thought it looked better and music is open your eyes by snow patrol. I purposefully chose a song I don’t like too much as I’m sick of hearing it now after all the editing! Oh and try and watch it in HD, the quality is much better.
No Comments »
