Trekking Nepal

AMADABLA

TECHNICAL INFORMATION

PERSONAL

I have been trekking in Nepal now nearly every year since 1991. As a person who gets a living by opening our garden to the public www.dungevalley.f9.co.uk I find the combination of people, scenery and plants perfect. I always travel with everything but the kitchen sink, after the freezing experience of the Kanchenjunga trek when a newly purchased sleeping bag turned out to be under filled with down, I now travel with just about everything one could wish for, employing a full trekking crew of upwards of seven people. This way one provides employment for the locals who are only too happy to receive westerners' money for wages. The cost is around $55 US a day.

CAMERAS 

My first camera was a Cannon A1 with a 28-70 zoom lens and polarizing filter. One is faced with a number of choices to take slide and/or print film? If both, do take two cameras as you are sure to find that you have the wrong film in the camera when shooting. On the Mustang trek I only took slide film but it was a very expensive operation getting them re-photographed for prints. To complicate matters still further I take a video camera with me to show my wife Liz where I have been; she cannot trek owing to having Rheumatoid Arthritis. The video camera was a Cannon A1 Hi8 but in order to not have to carry a large amount of weight in batteries I used a Solar panel and the set up worked very well. I sold the Cannon A1 and purchased a Cannon EOS 600 with again Cannon's 28-70 zoom lens. After reading the usual crop of Photographic Magazines I then part exchanged it for a Tamron 28-120 zoom; a big mistake. Even on the first few slides it was obvious that there was a lack of clarity and sharpness. This was soon sold and the excellent but very heavy Tokina ATX Pro 28-70 zoom was acquired second hand with a huge polarizing lens. This has been with me now for my last three treks. I use Kodachrome 64 slide film and Kodak Gold for prints. On an extended trek it is quite possible to go through ten reels x 36 of each. The slide film of course is processed by Kodak and although I have been tempted by the professional developers and printers for the print film the cost has been prohibitive so I resort to the high street but have had some terrible results with irreplaceable negatives coming back badly scratched and permanently damaged care of Boots the Chemist, never again! October 2002, the Tokina ATX Pro was left at home. to heavy and a Cannon 28-120 USM was used instead this lens has some good write ups but has its limitations but the results are acceptable, flare can be a problem. The reason for the parking up of the heavey ATX PRO was the purchase of a digital camera.

DIGITAL CAMERA

After much research I brought a Sony DSC 707 and for most purposes it has proved outstanding. The speed one can get the pictures onto the web is a dream and the quality of the lens is outstanding. Another major factor was battery life, it is also outstanding in this respect. I brought an extra battery and two 128 MB memory sticks giving me 80 reasonable quality shots on each. I saved about £100 on the purchase price by buying second hand from Jessops with a full 12 months guarantee.

VIDEO CAMERAS

The video camera was a Cannon A1 Hi8 but in order not to have to carry a large amount of weight in batteries I used a Solar panel and the set up worked very well. With the advent of digital technology and the much smaller size I purchased a Panasonic DV 100, three chip digital camera. This was acquired with one of the five hour capacity batteries and has proved adequate for trekking with a huge weight saving on the original set up. The Panasonic is only a DV out model and as only now, some three years after acquiring it, I have been able to afford the computing power to edit the video footage. In order to simplify matters I do edit on camera putting down a running commentary where appropriate and capturing the background sounds but five hours is a lot of video so some editing is my next project. Some problems after the 2002 trek, the picture is breaking up on playback and I have an estimate of some £450 for a repair. I have sent this with a letter to Panasonic and to date am awaiting a reply. The camera has had very limited use since my purchasing it in 1998 so I am not impressed.

COMPUTER

I am on a very steep learning curve with computers. The first purchase in February 2001 from N.E.C. with the latest spec with an Athlon 1.2Ghz chip set and DDR Ram and Windows 98 ME went back eventually as not of merchantable quality. The second computer, similar spec, supplied by Evesham also went back after freezing up and crashing. I have been scanning in large files to print out to A3 on an Epson Stylus Photo 1270 after some discussion with Evesham technical support it was obvious that Windows 98 Me is not robust and also the DDR Ram and motherboard were also problematic. In the end a compromise was reached, my own machine being downgraded to Windows 98 SE and the motherboard replaced to take PCC133 Ram. This has run fairly well but for a hitch adding hardware. I had heard good reports about Windows 2000 and have installed it as a dual boot system. It was great up to today when the installation of an additional 256 PCC133 Ram crashed it needing a complete reinstall but the beauty of the dual boot system, Windows 98 SE is running sweetly. I have now found a problem running Windows 2000 on the same drive, it seems to cause problems with Windows Explorer and FrontPage. The machine crashed and I had to do a complete reinstall. We have the computers Networked so all my important data was backed up. So far I have only put Windows 98 back on as I will change the hard drive in the near future, it has about 10% bad sectors and I fear a complete lock up again. Getting fed up with the time it takes to get a machine back from the dead, installing all the drivers and programmes and downloading from web sites to bring everything up to date I have purchased Partician Magic so I can Run multiple operating systems and get better usage of the new 60GB hard drive.

24/12/2002 well after a complete break down, the computer that is, and three on site visits failing to solve the problem, faulty Video card, I negotiated to have the machine updated for £100.installing 1.4 Ghz Chip 266 DDR ram two 60 gig hard drives windows 98 SE on one drive and Windows 2000 XP on the other. It runs very smoothly with no problems so far. Running with the FAT 32 file system each operating system can see each other.

SCANNERS

I use a Microtek Artiscan 4000t film scanner after spending some time on the web getting information. The quality is fine but the film handling for the print negatives is awful and very amateurish. The Microtek scanning programme has caused a number of problems locking up and is not all that robust. I'm looking into updating drivers or maybe another program. The prints are inputted using an old Black Widow 4800 SP scanner scanned at 300 DPI which produces some good results. I use Adobe Photoshop 6 to edit the scanned material but again this is a complex and extensive programme so it will take some weeks or months to master it.

VIDEO EDITING

I've purchased and installed a Pinnicle DV 200 it came with Premiere 6 and was not to expensive. My attempts at editing are very limited but Pinnicle Tools has a still capture facility that is enabling me to complete many of the missing parts of the treks. Of course the quality is no where near that of the slides and photographs but is still acceptable for web pages.

David Ketley

Dunge Valley Hidden Gardens
& Hardy Plant Nursery,
Windgather Rocks, Kettleshulme,
Nr. Whaley Bridge, (Stockport)
High Peak, SK23 7RF,
ENGLAND
Tel / Fax: 01663 733787

E-mail me at david@dungevalley.co.uk