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Athabasca Falls in motion

After my pre­vi­ous post “Athabas­ca Falls in black and white” with the motion of the water cap­tured with a slow shut­ter speed to give a streaked effect, I remem­bered that I had also cap­tured some video on that morn­ing. So—for your interest’s sake—here is: a short video clip of Athabas­ca Falls shot at 30 fps with a shut­ter speed of 1/30th of a sec­ond at f/16; a still pho­to of the same com­po­si­tion cap­tured at 1/5th of a sec­ond at f/8 and iso400 (the same set­tings as the image in my pre­vi­ous post); and a pho­to cap­tured at 1/125th of a sec­ond (which I’ve been told best cap­tures how our eyes/brains see motion) at f/9 and iso800.

The Athabasca river flows over the granite cliffs of Athabasca Falls in Jasper National Park, Canada

Athabas­ca Falls II (1/5th sec)

The Athabasca river flows over the granite cliffs of Athabasca Falls in Jasper National Park, Canada

Athabas­ca Falls III (1/125th sec)

 
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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.

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.

& 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.

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.