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What’s a Kawasaki GTR1400/Concours14 like to ride? NUCLEAR SHINKANSEN!

I picked up this Concours14 (or 1400GTR or ZG1400 depending on what market you’re in) back in April for $5500CAD.  It had been sitting for some time and was full of spider nests.  I got the safety sorted yesterday and got the bike licensed and on the road today so we’re ready to finally make some tracks with this thing.

What’s it like to ride?  I’ve owned more Kawasakis than any other kind of bike and their engines have always been what makes them special, and this bike is no different.  The 1352cc inline four at the heart of the Connie was identical to the ZR1400 hyperbike’s motor back in the day, and it shows.

On my first ride I pulled out to pass a truck and it was behind me almost too quickly to process.  I’m coming off owning a late 90s Fireblade so it’s not like I’m inexperienced with quick bikes, but the 1400GTR not only has the horsepower but also has the torque to back it up.  Where the ‘Blade was staggeringly quick (and light), you had to wind it up to make it go.  It felt like a light but not overpowered machine at sub 6000rpm engine speeds.  At 6k it became seriously quick and if you were brave enough to chase the 13,000rpm redline the bike turned into a total head case.

You don’t need to wring the Kawasaki’s neck to make astonishingly rapid progress.  It weighs over 100 kilos more than the Fireblade but makes over 30 more horsepowers and pound-feets of torque; it doesn’t feel heavy, which is an amazing accomplishment for a bike that can carry over 500lbs, has shaft drive and feels like it’s ready for five hundred mile days.

It’s not telepathic in corners like the ‘Blade was, but that bike’s focus was so singular that it made everything else difficult.  The 1400GTR does a good job of cutting up corners, hiding its 300 kilo weight well, but then it can also ride all day, still hit 40mpg and carry two up with luggage.

Ontario makes you buy a vehicle history when you buy a new bike but I don’t mind because it offers you insight into the machine’s history.  This bike is a 2010 model but it wasn’t first licensed for the road until 2014 (!) meaning it’s only been rolling for seven years rather than eleven.  The first owner had it two years and then sold it on to the guy I got it from.  He rode it for a couple of years and then parked it after it tipped over on him in a parking lot (hence all the spider nests).

The prolonged park is what shrank the seal in the clutch that I’ve since replaced.  The drop also stopped the windshield from moving but both things have been solved now and this Concours, with only 32k on the odometer, is finally ready to do what these bikes do best:  make big miles.  One of the guys at our local dealership is a Concours fan and got his over 400,000kms, so these things have staying power as well as horsepower.

I’m looking forward to getting to know this nuclear shinkansen (Kawasaki Heavy Industries makes bullet trains too!) better this summer.

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2017 Solar Eclipse Astrophotography

The August 21st, 2017 solar eclipse as seen from Elora, Ontario, Canada.  All taken with the P610 superzoom Nikon camera.  The welder’s lens I was using as a dimmer fell and broke, so the eclipse got filmed through a shard.  I think it came out better that way.






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It’s Editing All The Way Down: Creating a 360 Little Planet Stop Motion Video

This is one of those things that is probably more trouble than it’s worth, but since I have some time on my hands, why not give it a go?


Creating a ‘Little Planet‘ wrapped image out of a panorama or 360 photograph is something you can do directly in Ricoh’s online editing tool…






This is the image embedded in the online uploading tool that you can use with all Ricoh Theta 360 cameras:

https://theta360.com/s/dNyfH8RrBTIGWWf5WGXS8OYzo



Post from RICOH THETA. – Spherical Image – RICOH THETA



The problem with this process is that it’s quite clunky.  You have to upload each photo to the site, then set it to Little Planet, then, if you want to keep photo editing, screen grab it and bring it back down to the desktop.  If I’m trying to make a stop motion film out of over 300 photos, making Little Planets this way isn’t going to scale.


The solution was to find a way to create similar appearance in Adobe Photoshop and then batch process all the photos into a little planet format.  Instructables has a just such a tutorial.  The long and the short of the process is: stretch the photos into a square, flip them and the use a polar coordinates distortion tool to ‘wrap’ the square photo around the centre of the image.  The end result isn’t quite as nuanced as Ricoh’s online little planet geometry, which is specifically designed for the details of the Theta camera.  It’d be nice if Ricoh shared that geometry so people could duplicate the process in other software.



Lots of batch processed little planets!


I recorded those Instructable actions using the Photoshop script recording tool and then ran the batch ran the script on 384 photos auto-taken on a recent motorcycle ride (the 360 camera is attached to the windscreen).  The end result was 384 modified photos outputted to another directory.  I then took the photos and dropped them into Adobe Premier Pro, where I set the intro and outro pictures to slightly longer times and the main body to 0.02 seconds per photo, creating the stop motion video effect.


I threw in the intro to Rush’s Red Barchetta as some dystopian future background music (we’re in the middle of social distancing due to COVID19).  I fear it’s just a matter of time until travel itself becomes illegal, as it is in the song.


Here is the end result, a 26 second video containing over 380 individual photos batch processed in Photoshop and then edited into a short stop motion video:






The original footage was shrunk from 5376 x 5376 pixels (the ThetaV takes 5376 pixel wide panoramas and I made them square, remember?) to 1000×1000 pixels.  My logic there was a 1080p video is 1920×1080 pixels, so 1000×1000 pixels is almost 1080 wide.


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Spring Photography

 Macro shots taken with a Canon T6i DSLR with the Canon macro lens.

Rainbows taken with the same camera and a the kit lens:

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Bird Photography, because it’s hard

It takes patience and a lot of photos, but catching a bird just right never gets old.

A low light shot with lots of noise in it, but some photoshopping saved it.

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360 Winter Photos from the Saddle

These are some video screen grabs from the long way home commute from work last week.  Windy and cool, but still up near ten degrees Celsius with bright, winter sunshine.  The roads were relatively sand and salt free thanks to days of rain and floods.


The Ricoh Theta 360 camera is wrapped around the mirror with a Gorilla Pod.  A 360 video clip starts it off followed by some Adobe Lightroom heavily tweaked screen grabs aimed at creating a more abstract feel.



 




All the screen grabs with various modifications can be found in this album.



If you’re looking for a motorcycle friendly camera, the Theta 360 has push button controls that are easy to use (most others have finicky wireless connections through a smartphone).  You don’t have to aim it or focus it, it just grabs everything in an instant.  The screen grabs on here are from the 1080 video the Theta made while attached to the rear view mirror.


My last ride was November 28th.  I used the same 360 camera then, but didn’t have the Gorilla Pod at that point so those ones are all hand held.











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Exercising the OnePlus5 Smartphone camera

Following that adage I looked for a phone with a good camera this time around.  The OnePlus5 has an excellent camera as far as hardware goes, but the software still has some catching up to do.  Fortunately OnePlus seem committed to regular updates.


Walking home on Dec 23rd, one of the darkest days of the year, I took a post-sunset shot of the Grand River thinking it wouldn’t come out at all.  Not too bad for a very low light shot.  Similarly the multi-shot night time hockey gif taken on winter solstice in full darkness.


The photo of my lovely wife and her colleagues singing was also taken in a dark room.  It was post processed in Paper Artist, my favourite on-phone photo editing app.





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