2004 was the year for technical innovations at Backyard Bag Feeder Project headquarters. For years, I’ve been working with the same setup- A camera, maybe 2, feeding into the house and recording there - one thing that used to drive me insane was that one shot that I could gotten if I could just have moved the camera up a little… “Wow! That grackle shot would have made for a really good profile shot… but the head was cut off by the angle I had set up… too bad…” Well, that all changed in August ‘04 when I discovered the wonder of the motorized pan head… I knew of so called “pan/tilt/zoom” cameras, but they were usually priced at $800 or above, and the quality was on-par with an old handycam - if you already have a decent camera, it doesn’t make any sense to get a whole new lesser-quality camera just to be able to move it around. Then I found my solution: if I use a LANC controller on the camera (which lets me control the zoom and the focus settings), and a motorized pan head and it’s controls to move the camera around, the whole setup should work in the same way as a PTZ camera - and I could get broadcast-quality shots with the camera I already used. So I ordered a Bescor MP-101 panhead and a 50 foot LANC extender cable to use with a LANC controller I already had - this was mainly as a test, as I wanted to see how the whole setup would work in a project-like situation, without going all-out on getting equipment. Well, a week went by and I finally tested the setup outside in a controlled experiment with a fake project, just to see how the whole setup functioned. That test passed with flying colors - no actual shots to speak of, but I could move the camera all over and control focus/zoom and movement of the shot! “Now all I need is a panhead extender cable!” So another week passed, I got another panhead (for the secondary camera), a pair of cheap LANC controllers and extension cables for all of the controllers, LANC and panhead, had new holes drilled in the board sitting in the window (where the wires feed through), and stuck the whole shebam outside. My very first test of the whole setup was August 16th, 2004 - I put together a sample project (using another kind of foam, as I didn’t have any more of the normal stuff and I needed to throw together a proof-of-concept project for this demo) and put one of the cameras outside on the new panhead, which was then attached to a normal (somewhat flimsy) tripod. “Now, I know all of the equipment works, but how will the animals respond to all of these wires and the new setup??” Within an hour of setting everything up, a squirrel came and tore up the “demo” project as I’ve seen before, and I was able to move the shot around, get some interesting closeups of the squirrel who didn’t even seem to notice the camera moving! This kind of shot would have seemed impossible before this new setup! This day proved that the whole investment was worth the effort. “Just think of the shots I can get with this setup! The grackle shots, closeup of the feathers, closeups of squirrel paws, etc., and I can even fix the shot without having to run back outside!” This was one of the more important technical innovations that I still use to this day…

 

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