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Small boreal waterfall (video)




I’ve recently upgraded my com­puter to a newer machine capa­ble of pro­cess­ing the beau­ti­ful high-definition video files that my 5DmkII can pro­duce. It’s a lot of fun to learn about the whole new world of video cap­ture and edit­ing, and I’m just start­ing to get a bit of a han­dle on things.

One thing I’ve been doing recently as a first step into work­ing with video is to make a pho­to­graph and a video of the same sub­ject. These are basi­cally still pho­tographs, with motion. What I like about mak­ing shots like these is that some­times, the motion in a scene is an impor­tant part of the “essence” of the scene, and now I have a way to try to cap­ture that too.

In this exam­ple (com­pare the video in this post with the still pho­to­graph in yes­ter­days post), I used a long-ish expo­sure for the still image (1/2 a sec­ond) to hint at the move­ment of the water, but I also cap­tured this short video clip. I tried (some­what suc­cess­fully) adding a vignette effect to match the pro­cess­ing of the pho­to­graph. What do you think? Is there some­thing addi­tional in the video that’s miss­ing in the still photo? or does the video just add com­plex­ity to the image with­out adding to the “essence”? In any case, it’s fun to exper­i­ment with, and that’s the whole point. I hope you enjoy it.

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 —  Small boreal waterfall — Johnston Canyon waterfall — Golden sunrise on boreal lake —

Wintery Porcupine

Here’s another short video clip of this por­cu­pine I came across while out pho­tograph­ing along the North Saskatchewan River in the Strath­cona Sci­ence Park. He (or she) was pretty small, maybe about the size of a beach ball, and was not going any­where – if I moved too sud­denly he’d pause from his eat­ing, but he never left his spot. It’s hard to imag­ine how a por­cu­pine can get enough nutri­tion out of the dried grass and seeds that he’s eat­ing here to be able to sur­vive the kind of cold that we’ve been get­ting lately, but I guess they do.

You can push the fullscreen but­ton (four out­ward arrows at the bottom-right of the video) to view it larger, or fol­low the link to watch a high-definition ver­sion at vimeo.com.

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Related Entries:

 —  Goldeneye flock flying over river — Wintery details — Fog Ice & Water —

Fog Ice & Water

Here’s another short video clip that I took dur­ing this recent period of extremely cold weather. Walk­ing over the foot­bridge between Strath­cona Sci­ence Park and Run­dle Park, I was mes­mer­ized by the com­bined, over­lap­ping move­ment of the fog ris­ing from the river, the ice flow­ing down­stream, and the rip­ples in the water. The light breeze was mov­ing the mist around and the low sun was glint­ing off the thin ice­bergs, cre­at­ing a beau­ti­ful, swirling, shin­ing scene.

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Goldeneye flock flying over river

This past year I upgraded my cam­era to the Canon 5DmkII, it’s a ter­rific cam­era that I’m very happy with, and one of the neat tricks it does is shoot high def­i­n­i­tion video. I don’t shoot too much video — I’m a stills pho­tog­ra­pher at heart, regard­less of what the cam­era can do — but it is fun to try once in a while.

I took this short video this past week dur­ing the cold snap — it shows a small flock of Com­mon Gold­en­eye (Bucephala clan­gula) ducks swim­ming in the river then tak­ing off and fly­ing, land­ing again a ways upriver. The ducks dive briefly under the water sur­face a cou­ple of times before fly­ing — my best guess is that they’re “de-icing” their wings (it was about –35° C that morning).

You can push the fullscreen but­ton (four out­ward arrows at the bottom-right of the video) to view it larger, or fol­low the link to watch a high-definition ver­sion at vimeo.com.

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Related Entries:

 —  Wintery Porcupine — Flock of waterfowl at Ministik — Trumpeter Swans at Ministik Lake —