Bird Convention – The Movie
Several friends who viewed the previous blog post about the incredible bird convention that we witnessed at the Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge in May wanted to get a better sense of what it was like to bump into this mass of birds hanging around on the side of a busy road. The new breed of Digital SLRs gives us the ability to shot videos as well as stills. That doesn’t make it easy to do, nor does it ensure a high quality outcome. After some work and hand wringing, I decided to post this one minute video to fill out the story a bit. I’d suggest you watch it on the HD setting, as the quality is significantly better though it may take a minute to load. The sounds you hear are the same sounds the birds heard. This is a busy road, leading to a beautiful beach, on Memorial Day Weekend. The birds were not particularly impressed.
Video can do things that stills can’t, so I’ll be working on my technique and equipment a bit. The challenge of course is that doing two things at once can mean that you do neither terribly well. In this case, I was using a stills tripod, and it shows. Video tripods allow for smooth movement, stills tripods are built to make it nearly impossible to move the camera. On a technical note, this video was edited in Photoshop CS6, which has a significantly improved video capability. It’s also quite easy to use. I suspect that we’ll see quite a few videos being edited, on the fly as it were, in what was once a purely “stills” oriented software.
Mobile viewers: You may not be able to see the video thumbnail (though it seems to be working on my iPhone, which would indicate that WordPress may have been working on the problem). If you don’t see the video, please click here. Sorry for any inconvenience.
I very very very like this.