The111

Did he get tired with the other 5 guys climbing to his shoulders to jump off? Cool pics! www.WingsuitPhotos.com

Cool, keep the reports (and praise of my backflying ) coming! I missed you yesterday over there... you coming to Sebastian with Jeff next weekend? www.WingsuitPhotos.com

It's ok, you can come to us. www.WingsuitPhotos.com

To everybody but Mike I'll bet. Of course that's where the entire humor of it comes from... www.WingsuitPhotos.com

Well I just so happen to have one made, with menus and everything. It's widescreen and way higher quality than the wmv's I put online. Please PM me if you would like a copy, that goes for anybody.

Try smiling smarter. www.WingsuitPhotos.com

That same price can be obtained from many non-shady online dealers. CLICK I've ordered from a few of these: Dbuys and Abe's among the cheapest. www.WingsuitPhotos.com

Nice sunset shots indeed, Costyn! Something I don't get about the Zwartberg gallery though. Two pictures of big wingsuit groups on the ground, another one in the door of the plane... but not ONE in the air? What gives? www.WingsuitPhotos.com

Uh oh, it's the beergod. www.WingsuitPhotos.com

James, I think you can buy them from Best Buy. But you should also be able to get things mail ordered to the DZ for you, I would imagine... ask them in manifest. In this thread they are talking a bit about HC5 and HC7 differences. www.WingsuitPhotos.com

Exactly. Try giving me a straight answer for "what body position is needed to be a good skydiver?" www.WingsuitPhotos.com

Flour is useless without an adhesive. Mike took revenge on me in the Keys (even though I was not part of his original attack, just an amused observer) by getting me for my 500th with eggs, flour, and maple syrup. I think he was craving pancakes. www.WingsuitPhotos.com

And the song says: It could be enough if only we are pilots once a day. CLICK IT! (my site) The file will also be on SkydivingMovies.com once it is approved. Enjoy! www.WingsuitPhotos.com

Spot, since I know you are interested in wingsuits soon, I though I'd mention that with a wingsuit there are definitely post-deployment procedures (unzipping and stowing wings) that should be done AFTER clearing airspace and heading check, but BEFORE unstowing your brakes. Nothing wrong with leaving your brakes stowed, with the caveat that everyone else already mentioned (decision altitude). If you have things that need to be done after deployment, I'd argue it's LESS safe to unstow your brakes first, since you'll now be piloting a faster canopy while distracting yourself with other tasks (which you now have less time to accomplish). www.WingsuitPhotos.com

That's crazy, Glen! Who woulda known? I still wouldn't do it. www.WingsuitPhotos.com

I go so far as to tape my flash down... wouldn't want it coming open accidentally somehow. www.WingsuitPhotos.com

Thanks Dave. This is going to sound worse than it really is, but here's what I do to add a new gallery (not including tweaking each picture in a photo editor ). I will use my recent February 2007 gallery as an example: 1. Use a batch renamer (Adobe Bridge for example, or the free program "Batch Renamer" from sourceforge) to rename all the picture files to "2007-02_pXX.jpg" where XX is 01-99. 2. Make thumbnails named "2007-02_tXX.jpg". You could also just opt to have the thumbnails be "true" thumbnails (web-code-scaled-down versions of the actual files), but web browsers render to scale very poorly (especially when you're rendering frmo 600px to 150px, so I render my own thumbnail files (from the original full-scale images). 3. Take my batch of "template" html files (1 for each picture - each jpg has its own page) and use a batch text replace tool (Coffeecup is free) to replace all instances of "month year" with "February 2007" and "20xx-xx" with "2007-02". I also have to batch rename the template html files as with the jpgs. 4. Add a thumbnail to the main gallery page for the new sub-gallery. All the above takes 30 minutes TOPS. Probably much less. The most time-consuming part is that I have to go into each file and type out my "caption". That probably takes an hour or two for 60 pictures, but I really enjoy the story telling aspect of the captions, so I do the work. By far the most time-consuming thing is going through 500 pictures from an event and deciding which 60 are the best. Then tweaking each picture manually, one by one. This combnied process probably takes anywhere from 3-5 hours. It took me two entire weeks to design the entire site, but it only takes an evening to prepare and upload a new large gallery. I only do this once a month MAX, so it's worth it to me. Smugmug looks nice but you lose control over some minor things which are very big deals to me. Sharpening (unsharp mask, specifically) is one of the most powerful tools we have for displaying digital images on a computer screen. That is why I manually render separate 150px and 600px jpg's from my original images. You must sharpen at the final resolution, and not earlier. "Automatic" photo galleries make final sharpening impossible, besides the fact that they force auto-browser-rendering as I mentioned above. Pbase.com is another nice online gallery I've seen (though it suffers the same problems I just described). But I like their layout. I even "borrowed" some ideas for my own layout. www.WingsuitPhotos.com

From watching students, I'd say that most people, their first time in this position, have quite a bit of potato chipping, usually moreso in the pitch direction (think rocking horse). It's only a stable position if you're used to it. Practicing is a good idea. www.WingsuitPhotos.com

Just got home, Heffe. www.WingsuitPhotos.com

I use godaddy for MY SITE (both domain registration and hosting). I pay around $3/month for way more bandwidth/space than I need, I think. I built my site myself, using NOTEPAD. I learned all the coding from w3schools.com. www.WingsuitPhotos.com

Measure it. www.WingsuitPhotos.com

The rig wasn't worn backwards... www.WingsuitPhotos.com

Daylight Saving Time came early this year and the days are getting longer! Two more weeks... www.WingsuitPhotos.com

In a general physics sense it would be semantic to argue whether you were moving toward the base or the base was moving toward you. With no absolute reference frame, either is true. However, in a skydive the base IS the decided reference frame, so when you are in front of the base moving slower, you are effectively moving back toward them, and not the opposite. I have been a victim of underestimated closing speed (my own fault) more than once. It is a very scary thing, and unfortunately very easy to do (with both horizontal and vertical speeds). It's like ground rush... you can't see it until it's too late. - To avoid "ground rush" (base rush) don't "pull" (put on the brakes) too late. - Also, if there is any chance at all you could be underestimating your closing speed, plan to join the flock 50 feet to its side, and sideslide in once you've matched their forward speed and fall rate. That way if you are going too fast (or slow, it's all same in the end) you will not be on a collision course when you pass the flock. Glad everybody is ok. www.WingsuitPhotos.com

Hey, those are two good ones! www.WingsuitPhotos.com