VIDEO CAPTURES FROM CHINA

My video camera accompanied me to China. As on most of my trips, it went haywire (*see below) part of the way through but I overcame that with much swearing and some surgical tape and ended up with 4½ hours of film.

The beauty of this gizmo is that I can take stills from it and make pictures out of them. So I did. Here they are.

Some words of warning, however.

• If I had to make a living as a cameraman I'd starve. I am a cross between Stepehen Spielberg and a four-year old with a new toy, biased towards the latter. It shows.
• Some of these pictures have been grabbed from moving film. Consequently, they are not as sharp or as well-framed as a photograph.
• I have a worrying fascination for the zoom feature on my camera.
• There's lots of really good stuff that didn't capture well. Shame.

Oh well, you have been warned.

You can go to page 1, page 2, page 3, page 4 or page 5.

* Tales of woe:

• Peru: Camera fails to survive being dropped in Ica just before a plane ride over the Nasca lines.
• Europe: Six week trip, camera fails to work on second day (first day spent travelling, camera not used).
• India: No room in backpack for camera. Kicked myself for not bringing it.
• China: Day 5, the clever thumbwheel thing disintegrates. Amused Chinese visitors to the Terracotta Warriors learn new English swear words. So do my travel companions, come to that.