Taking Flight (slow motion experiment)

 

This is an experiment in time as much as capturing the geese in flight. Except for the last clip everything was slowed to either half or quarter speed. In most cases the eye accepts half speed as real but quarter speed has very limited uses if the illusion of reality is to be maintained.

Prairie Afternoon

I went out to the prairie for the first time in a couple weeks looking for insects to film.It was a good afternoon for dragonflies and butterflies. This short piece gives you an idea of what the afternoon looked and sounded like.

Technical: GoPro for time lapse, a variety of slow motion speeds to show the dragonfly in action. Natural sound taken from in camera microphone.

Pattison SP Postcard

   

This was part of the week filming prairie chickens and sharp-tail grouse. Not quite as exciting as wildlife. The editing challenge is getting sound to match the intensity of the action and setting a pace with the clips that fits the mood of the morning. Enjoy!

The original snow cone

This coyote took a break from his carcass feast to get a couple refreshing bites of snow. The day was perfect and I watched him for several hours until he waddled through the snow to rest on the hillside.

The snow bites have been slowed to half speed. While watching any of the current nature shows note the speed of the action. Slow motion is currently in vogue, given the quality of capture with Sony and high end video recorders, but tends to be overused in my opinion. I like to select a small portion of the clip to adjust and make the slow motion seamless with normal speed.

Slow Motion Birds

These ravens and magpies presented a perfect opportunity to experiment with slow motion. From a storytelling perspective there is something about the inertia of the carcass and the life it provides shown by the frenzy of the birds.

 Technical: Sony a7rii at 1/250 second, frame rate 120 fps. processed to 1/4 speed in FCPX

Winter Wave

This trumpeter swan's winter wave is more exercise than I have gotten recently, at leastt until yesterday's snow. It's nice to have a real winter  even if the shovel is the free weight for boosting upper body strength. There is almost enough to XC ski which is definitely a lot more fun than shoveling.

Technical: Photography is all about time manipulation. When shooting stills it usually is about freeing time. This wing wave is at a quarter normal speed to show the beauty of the fluid motion.

Milkweed and Friends

One of my goals this summer was showing the interaction between insects and prairie flowers. Common milkweed is a perfect plant to show insect drama on the prairie. While it is not native it has been adopted by resident butterflies as a preferred food source. Slow motion recording is the perfect medium to show butterflies and bees around these flowers.

Technical: Insects are shown at 1/8 normal speed, recorded with SonyRX10ii.

Slow Motion Flight

 

There are plenty opportunities for birds in Yellowstone and I could not pass up this chance to film flight in slow motion. I started doing slow motion last summer on my iPhone getting hooked on it. Recorded at 1/8 normal speed using a Sony RX10ii.

April Shower

What does an intelligent, rational nature photographer do with a new camera? He goes out in the rain to test it. I have been waiting for an opportunity to test the slow motion video features on my Sony RX10ii and this was a perfect opportunity. I have previously tried filming frogs jumping, it worked but I didn't get enough material for a story.

Technical: The camera had some problems in the rain. The LCD would display an error message but the electronic viewfinder continued to work. After thoroughly drying it all is back to normal. An eye dropper will also be used to place the water drops within the frame. The four raindrops in this piece took half an hour to capture.

Tiny Stream

I started playing with slow motion video using my iPhone last summer and found it was a great tool to modify time in nature.  One of the pitfalls I see on Youtube is using slow motion throughout the entire video, decreasing its drama. This short video has two slow clips interspersed with normal footage. A Sony RX10ii was used with speed slowed 8x (1second=8seconds).

Prairie Rose Cafe

I'm continuing my exploration of the prairie using high speed video recording on the iPhone. These small flies were busy one morning last week and tolerated the close up attachment that requires a distance of about an inch for optimum focus. Recorded at 240 fps which means one second of action translates into 8 seconds of video. Now if I could afford a more sophisticated camera that records in high speed. Most cameras limit the shooting time to a few seconds because of the intense onboard computer commitment to process and store that volume of information. The high end cameras have a pre-record feature so you can save the action after it has happened. This is a great feature since it can take several seconds for a camera to transfer the information to a memory card.

Bees & Butterfly Weed

I'm continuing my test of the iPhone for nature photography and videography. This piece was shot using the stock lens at 240 fps, replayed at 30 fps. Audio was also recorded at the time of capture. I used creative license and put the best buzzing at each of the flight times, along with dropping the level of background audio. New lens attachments are being tested and there will be a video available next week.

For those of you who are more interested in still photography I have started using Flickr regularly and can be found at:

Flickr Photostream

As always, just sharing my love of nature.

Enjoy,

Dale

Clematis in the Rain

An early evening shower gave me the opportunity to explore the slow motion capabilities of the iPhone6. It shoots at 120 and 240 frames per second which when played back at 30 frames per second gives video at 1/4 or 1/8 normal speed. For me slow motion works best when it is not obvious and the brain believes what it sees as normal. Watching a rain drop land is always a slow motion event is my mind so this was a perfect opportunity.

Another pleasant surprise shooting video with the phone is the excellent audio quality. For this video I looped the best audio of a clip for the entire sequence and put a Youtube soundtrack over it. Editing is done in Final Cut Pro X. 

Technical: Most of the slow motion shots were at 240 fps. I don't know which clips were shot at 120 or 240 fps.

Snow Geese Landing

Only 8,000 snow geese were listed in the weekly count but warmer weather held promise for more birds. About a hundred thousand arrived on my first morning giving spectacular opportunities. This year flight shots were taken at a slow shutter speed, less than 1/100 second, in an attempt to convey the atomsphere of thousands of geese in the air. It was also a contrarian statement since geese are usually photographed frozen in space by a high shutter speed.

Slow Creeper

Another version of my fascination with this hyperactive bird.  The video is shown at half normal speed so the birds unique behavior can more easily be seen.  Filmed at the Owl Ave. feeder complex in Sax Zim Bog.  This is an excellent feeder for a variety of birds and photogenic placement of the feeders.  Technical: Overcranked to 60 fps, shutter speed 1/125 to match shutter angle.  Converted to 30fps in Final Cut to create slow motion.

Catch me if you can!

Another photo from Sax Zim that shows its range of birds.  Brown creepers and great gray owls have feathers but other than that they could not be more different.  The photographer's challenge is to get an image with the beak an eye present in this bird that is in nonstop motion, I guess that's why there is a high speed burst mode.