Five legs good! Two legs bad!

A colleague ended up -- by a convoluted path -- owning one brand new telescope and two brand new tripods, so I (naturally) bought one of the tripods from her.

"Sure, that screw-in yoke will fit my camera. No bother," I said, as she handed the box to me in the job car park.

I wonder what the security people made of it all. A plain white package emerges from the boot of car and is passed to the fat guy with the ponytail who waltzes nonchalantly back into the building with it turcked under one arm. I'm sure someone was electronically marking the security videos for future reference.

Anyway, the tripod is about six feet tall extended. My camera is about a first-class stamp in size, all ready for action. But the screw-in bit DOES fit, so I'm happy.

When out in the garden yesterday afternoon (see this post), I figured I'd use the tripod to capture old Hover Boots in action. So I unwrapped it from its canvas satchel, unclipped its upper leg lock clamps and extended its telescopic legs. Then I unclipped the lower leg lock clamps and extended the telescopic legs of the telescopic legs. I unclipped the camera plate and screwed it into the base of the camera. I fitted the camera plate back into its groove on the tripod head and locked it in place. Then I loosened the tilt nut and using the pan handle I angled the camera until it was roughly horizontal. Then I tightened the leg lock clamps, which I should have done before anything else. I grabbed a classy, white plastic garden chair and sat down on it. Then I was ready. For anything. I thought.

The subject was hovering about twelve inches from the camera. I could see him flitting back and forth in the viewfinder. Not having many manual controls on the focus, I started tapping at the autofocus until he appeared momentarily in the middle of the viewfinder.

Click.

"Bugger!"

He had buzzed off to the right. I grabbed the pan handle, loosened the lock and panned slightly to the right. A blurr of wings hovered in the middle of the viewfinder. I tightened the pan lock and tapped on the autofocus.

Click.

"Feck!"

I peered over the camera at the hover fly. It stuck out an insect tongue at me and went on hovering.

I picked up the tripod and moved it forward a couple of inches. I looked through the viewfinder. Nothing except green leaves.

I craned my neck around to the right. No sign of the fly.

"He'll be back."

A couple of minutes later, he pinged into view in the middle of the LCD screen.

"Focus... focus-focus-focus-focus-focus-focus focusfocusfocus... Feck!"

The tripod and I marched back and forth across the garden for half an hour until both me and the fly sat panting and wasted.

"Okay," I said. "You don't like formal shots? I'll try informal then..."

I grabbed the camera off the tripod and started stalking about the bushes. In ten minutes more I had 50 or so shots, two of which were really good, the rest useable. My neighbour and his family took turns at looking at me through the back bedroom window. No doubt ehy'll say a little prayer for me on Sunday.

None of the shots taken with the tripod were any good. There were a couple of blurry smudges in the middle of each photo which could have been anything.

The tripod is presently resting back in its satchel. I may take it out for a walk another day.

Pass me the Gazebo, missus

A little bit of sunshine has ensued and it hasn't rained much to speak of on the east coast for the past week or so. The Home section of Dunnes Stores is playing a blinder selling garden furniture, barbeques and gazebos. I could see burly husbands marching boxes of them out to parked cars in The Square yesterday. The wives were following up with shopping trolleys laden with bedding plants.

Our B&Q gazebo was unpacked from winter hibernation this morning. My father, who had called to show me his shiny new seven-year-old car, watched as I poked lightweight metal tubes together and made the magic of the summertime appear amidst bags of recycling drinks tins and plastic bottles which is our back garden.

The black cat put in an astonished appearance only briefly. Although he is becoming less wary of visitors if they are in the back garden (more room for him to escape if they should turn on him) he is still unhappy to see old men. The old man next door has had reason enough to chase our cats out of his shed in the past which I think is the source of Black Cat's phobia.

A note left on the counter this morning reads:

"If you have time, could you clean the litter trays?"

My work is cut out for me. At least I shall have a gazabo to relax in later today. I also have a new gas-fired barbeque, so if you hear sirens and see flashing blue lights this afternoon, you'll know what's happened.

No work til Monday.

Related Post: B&Q Gazebo instructions

"How to dismantle an atomic bomb"? Boys, I've done that loads of times.

The back room, as we called it, was the one with the packing crates for floorboards that you didn't want to jump up and down upon too often. In there were kept my toy boxes, which contained the ruins of at least three childhoods before mine came along and the scraps of my hobby of disassembling things into minute parts and never being able to put them together again.

All the kings horses and men had nothing on me.

I was always bothered about why toys come in different scales. On the one hand I had one large green plastic army tank (sans wheels), that had a great turret that moved 360 degrees and could be pulled off to simulate an explosion like they had in Warlord, the weekly comicbook. Then, by contrast, there were about fifty or so small green plastic soldiers, way out of scale to the tank. I got over that be watching Godzilla movies and reading about dinosaurs. Suddenly, the idea of the giant menacing monster facing off against bevvies of human-sized victims had a real appeal. Legions of helpless soldiers were run down by the giant tank until someone managed to lob a last gasp hand-grenade through its driver's window and Boom! off went the turret. The day was won!

I think my mother might have been perturbed at my propensity to distruction, because she finally settled on a toy I could take apart and put back together: Lego.

Lego makes good exploding tanks. With the right kits, you could get moving turrets, tank tracks (Lego constuction-site machinery put to a reassembled use), and even put together a fairly impressive spaceship. Exploding turrets in primary colours are as much fun as green Made-in-Hong-Kong ones.

The TV show, Space 1999, was a great inspiration. Most of the spaceships in this sci-fi afternoon hide-behind-the-sofa epic looked like they'd been modelled out of Lego anyway.

Warlord was my favourite comic. It was a real stiff-upper-lip, how-we-won-WWII British publication, but it didn't matter. Comicbook action heroes in army uniforms were the staple fare, except for super spy, Lord Peter Flint, who sometimes could be seen in civvies. The faceless hoards being exploded by limpet mines and other wonderful boyish weapons was the great attraction. It was no surprise that I moved on to a collection of WWII factual part-works discovered in another corner of the back room, although the real-life photos of death, cruelty and destruction were no boyish entertainment.

I haven't disassembled a toy and found the bits more interesting than the whole in years and years. I wonder are they even made the same way these days?