JaseMK

Behind the scenes - timelapse video

2011-09-01T06:59:00.001+01:00

I was recently asked to help out at a Taekwondo studio shoot with photographer Ben Luckman. In between moving lights and backdrops around and generally being in awe of these guys' martial arts awesomeness, I decided to shoot a little behind the scenes video and set up a time lapse camera in the corner of the studio to capture the whole session.

For the techie geeks out there, the time lapse frames were shot on a Nikon D70 tethered to a Macbook running Sofortbild timelapse and camera control software, shooting a frame every 12 seconds for the duration of the two hour shoot. I set the D70 to manual focus and exposure to avoid the camera hunting around and to give stable light levels. Video clips were shot on a Flip HD pocket video recorder and the whole lot was put together in iMovie '11.

This is the result:

TKD Shoot Aug 11 from Jason Carvalho on Vimeo.

I've got a long list of things I'd do differently next time, but I think the concept seems to work quite well.

For more info on Ben's photography, check out his flickr stream and website.

Roadster

2010-07-28T16:43:00.001+01:00

I bought a new car from a friend a couple of weeks ago. I didn't really need another car but it was a bargain and I couldn't resist. It's a 1990 Eunos Roadster (Jap import Mazda MX-5). Not sure if being 20 years old makes it a classic car or just old.

It's not perfect. One of the rear dampers feels like it's knackered and a bit bouncy so left and right cornering isn't entirely consistent when pushed hard, there are a few paint chips and scuffs here and there, the diff needs an oil change and the stereo speakers are ready for the dustbin. On the plus side though, it has extremely low mileage, a new hood, a brand new stainless steel exhaust, two sets of wheels, a sweet running little engine and has just sailed through an MOT with no problems at all.

By my reckoning it should make for a very cheap little toy to stick in the garage and take for a drive on sunny days. Unlike my previous Roadster this one's 'just' a 1.6. I say 'just', but the difference in power between this and the 1.8 is negligible and if anything I would say that the 1.6 is the revvier, more sporty engine. I think this one's had an uprated flywheel too which feels great, especially on downshifts. Makes the VX220's powerplant feel positively lazy.

I've only had a chance to drive it properly a couple of times so far but I'm absolutely loving it. It's not fast by any stretch of the imagination but the steering is quick and precise, the brakes feel great (especially after driving modern over assisted cars), the gearchange is sweet and the raspy little exhaust puts a grin on your face when buzzing about with the roof down.

I think I'd forgotten what a pleasure driving could be.

I need to take a can of anthracite/dark grey paint to the naff looking red wheel centres and get hold of some cheap door speakers so I can listen to the radio, but that's about it. New shocks and bushes would be a luxury but they can wait till next summer.

Pictures to follow soon no doubt.

Electric bicycle

2010-06-07T16:35:00.002+01:00

If I'm honest, I've never really seen the point in electric bicycles until now. They're not really quick enough to mix it up with other traffic, like you can on a scooter, and if you're going to pootle along at 10-15mph on cycle paths then you may as well just pedal a normal bike and get some exercise in the process. Still, I was offered one for the weekend so I thought I'd give it a go.

Essentially it's a regular town bike with a motor inside the front hub. The battery for the motor is where your bottle would usually sit (it's about the same size) and the right hand handlebar grip doubles up as a throttle. There's also a small control box sitting on the rear pannier rack and a bunch of wires connecting it all up. It still has front and rear mechs and shifters so can be pedaled like a regular bike without any assistance if you so wish.

Once on the go, it makes surprisingly rapid progress. The motor is limited to a maximum speed of 15mph which sounds slow but is actually plenty quick enough for buzzing about on cycle lanes and you can always use a bit of pedal power to boost that if you wish. I passed four other cyclists puffing away uphill on regular bikes on my 15 minute commute, like they were standing still. On the flat it's up to speed in a few seconds, although there is a second of so of lag between twisting the throttle and the motor kicking in. On the uphills it struggles a little but will still get you up slowly without pedaling. However, it really only takes the lightest of effort on the pedals (imagine an exercise bike on low resistance) to assist the motor up hills without losing any speed at all.

I've now ridden the bike both to and from work and in both directions it took pretty much exactly the same amount of time to do the door to door journey of around 3 or 4 miles as it does in the car. Milton Keynes has an excellent network of cycle and foot paths that mean I can do the journey without touching any roads, however I'd feel fine riding this on the road through town in 30mph zones. Anything more than that and a scooter becomes more appropriate. Range is supposedly around 25 miles, but the battery unclips easily and can be recharged at your desk in a few hours. I believe this model had a 250W motor although there are bikes available with over double that power which would be better suited to hilly locations.

The two barriers for me that make riding to work difficult are secure storage and shower/changing facilities at work. The electric bike doesn't solve the secure storage issue but does mean you can ride into work in a shirt and smart trousers without needing to shower or change when you get in, which is a big plus point over a regular bike. I don't really have a need for one at the moment but if I had a commute of up to about 10 miles each way then I would seriously consider one of these as my daily transport. Bought through one of the employee tax free cycle schemes, it would work out pretty cheap. No road tax or insurance to pay and a daily charge only costs a few pence of electricity (I'm led to believe that it's less than 10p).

Career change

2010-05-17T17:27:00.004+01:00

A lot has happened since January. In February my employer announced a restructure, with some inevitable redundancies. At the end of March my time at Cranfield University came to an end, after nearly eleven years. During that time I gradually moved from IT to marketing, working as a sys admin, then web application developer and finally as online marketing manager, qualifying with the Chartered Instistute of Marketing only a couple of months ago.

Time for a change now though and a chance to pursue something that's been on my mind for a few years. In September I begin my PGCE year to train to become a secondary maths teacher. Time to start revising my calculus.

Trail centre - Cwmcarn

2010-01-28T14:00:00.004Z

My new year resolution of visiting some of the mountain bike trail centres around the UK is progressing nicely, last Sunday I took a drive over to South Wales to ride the Twrch trail at CwmCarn. It's only a 30 minute drive past the Severn Bridge, so dead easy to get to for those living in the south and close enough for me to drive there and back in a day. Bar a few hundred metres of wider fire road, the Twrch trail is 18km of excellent windy singletrack. It starts with a pretty hefty climb that took about an hour with a few stops to take photos and catch breath. It's an interesting climb though, winding alongside a river then zig zagging up the hill with plenty of roots and rock steps to keep you occupied. At the top is a freeride area with tabletops and berms aplenty, followed by about 45 minutes of mostly downhill or flat singletrack back to the carpark. The last couple of minutes of descent in particular is very smooth, very swoopy and very fast, which puts you on a nice adrenalin high when you come to a halt back at the car. Just time to grab sandwich and a drink before heading out for a second lap...

Definitely worth the effort for a visit, although next time I have a spare Sunday I might try Afan which is another half an hour or so along the M4 and has a wider selection of trails.

Bike skills coaching session

2010-01-25T17:25:00.000Z

I attended a mountain bike coaching session last Friday with Tony Doyle of UK Bike Skills. The day was bought for me as a Christmas present last month and I'd been waiting for the date to come around with some anticipation. I'd heard good things about Tony's courses but was also a tiny bit sceptical about what there was left to learn having been mountain biking for 20+ years.

I'm happy to say that any negative thoughts instantly evaporated once we got underway. Turns out there is plenty to learn and I picked up more in 5 hours on Friday than I have done in years. Particular focuses for me were cornering, smoothness through complex series of sections and a fear of my wheels leaving the ground. By the end of the day I was clearing tabletops, handling small drops with ease and flying through berms at what previously would have felt like impossible speeds. Swoopy singletrack is now more fun than it's ever been.

Big thumbs up to Tony and UK Bike Skills.

So, 2010

2010-01-15T15:02:00.009Z

Here's a few notable bits and pieces from 2009

Got married
Had an amazing holiday in New Zealand and Australia
Got a half marathon personal best of 1:56
Entered my first triathlon
Bought a few bikes
First sports car free year since 2002
Set up a darkroom in the garage for 'proper' B&W wet prints
Completed my CIM Diploma (awaiting results)

A few of those were realised 2009 new year resolutions. There were a few other failed resolutions that will have to carry over to this year though, notably spending more time in the darkroom printing up and framing some photos for the house and perhaps making a photo book or two.

Now is also the time to start looking at the sporting calendar for the year. I'm so far booked in for another 'Rat Race' urban adventure race (in London this time) in September and will no doubt also do the Milton Keynes NSPCC Half Marathon and maybe one or two 'Ace Races' one-day adventure races. I'm going to have another crack at a sprint triathlon again too, I know what to expect this time so can concentrate on getting a slightly better time. Something in particular I've got my sights on this year is trying some enduro events - endurance mountain bike races that last 8 hours/100km-ish - I like the idea of pacing something like this out rather than going hell for leather and coughing my guts up hard for 45 minutes.

Finally I want to visit at least a couple of MTB trail centres in either South Wales or the Scottish Borders. My last trail centre visit was Coed y Brenin in about 2000ish so I'm keen to take the riding a little further from home again.

So there it is. Basically, take more pictures and ride more. On that note, here's a picture from a recent ride.

(click for larger version)

Jase Fried Chicken

2009-11-02T11:42:00.007Z

Crikey, it's been a while. Two months in fact. It's been reasonably busy, hence not posting here, in that time I've gotten married and spent nearly a month in New Zealand and Australia on honeymoon. Photos coming soon once I've had a chance to go through them all.

So now we're back to reality, the weather's rubbish and I'm skint. This weekend was particularly unpleasant outdoors, so I decided not to go riding and did a spot of cooking instead. Inspired by a colleague at work, I decided to fry some chicken as a late evening snack, dead simple. I covered the chicken in Jack Daniels BBQ Sauce, covered it and left it in the fridge to marinate. A few hours later it gets taken out of the fridge, rolled in rice flour and fried in a few cm of oil until golden (probably around 15 minutes). It's the first time I've tried this and they taste excellent. The rice flour is a neat trick and goes really crispy when fried, without the need for complicated or messy liquid batter. Continuing the cooking theme, Helen also made some cup cakes this weekend. Edible glitter is great and these easily tasted as good as they looked.

As the weekends get colder and wetter over the winter, you can expect a little less bike talk and a bit more food photography on here. Having said that, there may be some Yorkshire based bike news coming soon which I can neither confirm nor deny at this stage...

Thetford Forest

2009-08-24T16:17:00.007+01:00

Seeing as I was over Cambridge way at the weekend I thought I'd drive the extra 40 minutes or so to Thetford Forest to check out some of the marked out mountain bike trails over there. As well as some basic routes for all the family there are a couple of purpose built MTB trails, they're marked up as 'black' and 'red' routes according to their difficulty although it turns out this was a bit of a red herring. I set off firstly on the black route, expecting some difficult and technical trails but sadly that wasn't the case. The route is currently quite badly eroded (from the rain?) and is basically about 12 miles of flat and very bumpy singletrack. With a bit of speed you can stand up and pump through the pot holes, bumps and roots but this soon becomes tiring. Sitting down isn't much better and was pretty uncomfortable and tedious even with 120mm of rear suspension. The route almost redeemed itself towards the end with a short technical descent labelled 'The Beast' which had a few reasonably steep drops and a few nice swoopy bends.

After returning to the car park and with a little bit of time on my hands I decided to give the red route a try. This was instantly more interesting and enjoyable than the black route. It's maintained by a bunch of guys called TIMBER and flows much smoother, with plenty of nice little banked turns, raised sections and small jumps. There is always a limit though to what can be done with a totally flat environment. Thetford Forest is completely flat so there are pretty much no descents or ascents, although it goes some way to making up for this with literally miles and miles of nice singletrack (on the red route, at least). Time only allowed for the short version of the red trail unfortunately, so I was back at the car within about 45 minutes. I'd like to have tried the longer version of the red route but I'm not sure it's worth the 1:40 drive out there again from Milton Keynes. If I'm ever over that way again...

Overall an enjoyable couple of hours and it made a nice change from my usual local trails but not the most interesting mountain biking I've ever done. The trail difficulty ratings are also a tad ambitious to say the least.

Coast 2 Coast - update

2009-08-05T16:52:00.005+01:00

Slightly delayed post, but the C2C bike ride was a success. We were amazing lucky with the weather (torrential rain stopped the minute we got on the bikes and then started again three days later as soon as we'd finished) and didn't really suffer any mechanical problems other than a single puncture on the first day. Day one was long, leaving Milton Keynes at 3am. Due to some irritating public transport problems we didn't actually start riding until 1 o'clock and finally arrived at our camp site, 65 miles later at about 8. Day two was across the Pennines and included three or four huge climbs, although we only had about 40 miles to cover so were done riding by the afternoon. Day three was a piece of cake, one short climb first thing in the morning for a few miles and then it's a gradual descent for about 20 miles all the way into Newcastle and then onto Tynemouth. I didn't take the GPS this time round so didn't measure exactly how far we rode but I'm guessing it was somewhere in the region of 140 miles.

It wasn't easy by any stretch of the imagination, but some lessons learnt from the last attempt made life a lot easier. Firstly, a decent saddle! There's no avoiding a certain amount of discomfort but a well fitting saddle is a godsend. Note, well fitting doesn't necessarily mean well padded - my current saddle is pretty hard but much more comfortable than some super spongy seats I've had in the past. I also went for semi slick tyres this time round as opposed to off road knobblies. There are enough sections of light off road terrain on the route to make proper road slicks a bad idea, but semis are perfectly adequate and roll much more efficiently on the road sections. Finally, I used some proper panniers this time instead of carrying everything in my rucksack. After three days a rucksack starts to give you backache, neck pains and makes the saddle more uncomfortable due to the increased upper bodyweight. Despite the bike weighing a ton with the panniers attached, handling isn't massively affected if you stay seated and sensible.

That's pretty much it for 2009 as far as major sportiness is concerned. I ran the Milton Keynes half marathon a couple of weeks ago (new PB, 1:56!), so now I can just relax and settle back into gentle weekend runs and rides over the autumn/winter. I didn't manage as many adventure races as I'd have liked, but with the wedding coming up in 6 weeks money and time are a little short.

Coast 2 Coast

2009-07-14T17:04:00.003+01:00

This weekend I'm off up north to ride the C2C cycle route - Whitehaven on the west coast to Tynemouth on the east coast. It's about 150 miles and should take three days. This is my second time doing the route, although unlike last time we're camping along the way and carrying all our gear on the bikes - tent, sleeping bags, stove, food, the lot. Fingers crossed for dry weather.

Updates along the way on Twitter (if I get mobile signal and the iPhone stays awake for that long) and more info and pictures on here next week I'd imagine.

Singlespeed

2009-07-10T23:21:00.010+01:00

More bike news. I've had an old '98 Specialized S-Works frame hanging in the garage for a while, along with a massive box of random bits and pieces, some old Rockshox, pedals, odd cranks and so on. On closer inspection, it turns out I pretty much had enough old parts to build the S-Works into a complete bike.

Minus the gears.

I can't read a mountain bike magazine or website these days without coming across someone banging on about how great singlespeed bikes are and how it's liberated them from the bloat of the modern mountain bike. Lightweight, low maintenance, cheap to run and fun to ride. Sounds good to me - Colin Chapman would be proud. So a couple of evenings later spent spannering in the garage and I have my first singlespeed bike. The only thing I had to buy was a cheap chain tensioner to take up some slack in the chain which cost about a tenner, otherwise it cost me pretty much nothing.

And the verdict? Brilliant! I went for a group ride at the weekend and had no problems whatsoever keeping up on the climbs. In fact if anything the 32/16 ratio forces you keep up a quicker pace than you might otherwise be riding with 27 gears. The bike is surprisingly light and solid - no chain slap or other rattles - and can be hooned about like a complete hooligan, especially with wide bars. Jumping over roots and other small trail obstacles is effortless and the lack of shifters gives the bars a nice uncluttered feel.

I shouldn't imagine it'll see as much action as the FSR or Inbred, but it's a nice addition to the collection for when you fancy something a bit different.

On One - Inbred

2009-05-26T12:27:00.005+01:00

I've been quite busy since the last entry here, mainly messing around with bikes in the garage. My trusty GT Zaskar LE of 14 years has now been dismantled and I've given the frame to my brother as his S-Works was a bit on the small side. To replace it, I picked up another frame - On One Inbred - to be built up as my commuting bike and hardtail MTB for when I fancy a change from the FSR.

It's been a while (14 years in fact) since I've ridden a steel framed MTB and have gotten used to either the super stiff aluminium Zaskar which climbs well but shakes you to bits over fast rough stuff or the plush FSR which is fast and smooth but a bit of a slog uphill. The Inbred is a revelation! I'm not sure if it's just my imagination but it seems to climb even quicker than the Zaskar and definitely way smoother over fast rough singletrack. The steeper head angle and low flat bars make for lightning, if not slighty twitchy, steering which is a nice alternative to the relatively slack and bouncy FSR with huge riser bars.

All in all I'm dead chuffed. It's going to make a no nonsense commuter and an awesome little hardtail MTB for short blasts up the woods. If I can convince myself to do any more XC racing this year after last month's DNF, it'll make a great race bike too. And to top it off, I stuck some slicks on it on Sunday and entered my first triathlon, passing several lycra-clad guys on expensive looking road bikes.

Lisbon Half Marathon

2009-03-24T12:29:00.007Z

Well, the first big event of the year is out of the way now. Last weekend was the Lisbon Half Marathon and it went surprisingly well. Managed to come in inside my two hour target (1hr59:03) which I was pleased with, but what was more pleasing was the fact that it was the first of the four half marathons I've run now where I've kept a consistent pace from start to finish. Apart from a slow start due to traffic (30,000 people), pretty much every km was within about 10 seconds of the target pace.

April is looking empty now, events-wise, then in May it's back into it with the first of the adventure races and my first triathlon. Just ordered myself some road tyres for the MTB which should help me get a bit nearer to that target pace on the bike.

Here's the Lisbon route...

New trainers

2009-02-10T17:01:00.004Z

I braved the snow today and decided to go out for a run at lunchtime.The Lisbon half marathon is less than six weeks away and I'm massively behind with amount of running and mileage I wanted to be doing by this point.

Bought a couple of new pairs of trainers in the January sales, one of which were these Salomon XA Pro 3D Ultras. It makes me cringe running in less than perfect conditions with pristine white road running shoes, so these should come in handy this year with all the adventure races and off road running. First impressions are good. They fit very snugly with their interesting lacing system - instead of regular laces they've got a drawstring arrangement which tucks away neatly into into the tongue. Not only does it look really neat but you can put the shoes on and have them tightened perfectly in seconds. Getting them off is a breeze too, especially compared to untying tight lace knots on regular trainers with post-run frozen fingers. Size-wise they're a touch on the narrow side, not too much of a problem for me really but worth considering if you have wider feet. The main thing that surprised me (other than being really bright red) was how light and comfortable they are to run in. I've put off getting specific trail running shoes for a while, worrying about all the extra weather protection making them heavy and cumbersome. Not so, these feel great, even on the road. Big thumbs up.

First ever blog post

2009-01-27T13:47:00.003Z

Hmmm, let's see. First ever blog post. I've set this up, mostly, to test out available blogging facilities with a view to setting up something similar as part of my role at work. There was a time when www.jasoncarvalho.com was the sole source of everything I might want to upload onto the web - blogs, diaries, photos, personal info. There's little point in maintining that these days. Instead, my entire online presence can be managed with various Web 2.0 apps:

Expect to to find all sorts of drivel on here over the coming year, ranging from training notes for two half marathons, a triathlon and four adventure races, wedding plans, possible notes from our killer honeymoon round Oz and NZ and various bits and pieces testing blogging functionality for work.