Getting once again tired of my standard method of setting up shots, I tried my “aerial shot” technique that I tried once before in June… again. And about as moronicly set up as it was in June (remember how I had it taped to the window?), with this setup, I had the $10 camera taped (yes, taped) to the end of a kind of sturdy tripod, which was then suspended by a clothesline. Instant aerial shot. The things I do to get different shots… and of course, when you have a shot like that, it’s an absolute pain to set up! If you just move it a little, it screws the centering of the shot up, so you have to move the back of the tripod, which moves the camera off center, then move the camera, which then moves the tripod back to where it was, then move the tripod again, which… lets just say it took about 20 minutes to finally center the shot when it was set up… and even then, if it just moved a -little- bit, the shot wouldn’t work - so this was an absolute joy to work with, but the shots themselves were somewhat interesting… and when I finally got enough brains to put a panhead on the setup (yes, with even more tape on that), I could center the shot up much easier and get closeups of the tops of squirrels - another interesting perspective… Of course, this whole “aerial” idea followed me into the 2006 season, but as you will see when I put shots from that year up, I have a much smarter way to do it then…
One interesting thing to mention - the white cubes all around the area of the mat aren’t foam, they’re pieces of popcorn… I wanted to see if the birds wanted the popcorn, but after a little interest shown by the birds (2 sparrows came by), the squirrel began it’s normal routine of digging for the nuts…
One other interesting thing to mention - This was exactly one year after I watched the squirrel trash the project while looking for food. One year later exactly, and there’s not nearly as much activity at the project - that shows how much the dynamic of interest can change from year to year!
BFP 7-20-05 (Demo) [0:23m]: Play Now | Play in Popup BFP 7-20-05 (High Quality 800Kbps Version) [2:29m]: Play Now | Play in Popup BFP 7-20-05 (Low Quality 300Kbps Version) [2:29m]: Play Now | Play in Popup
Sometime in mid-June, I got another camera from eBay for the purpose of using for far, far-away shots, a Canon L2 - originally made in 1994 or so. One advantage to using that camera is that you can get a special extender that lets you use long lenses, so you can get shots from extremely far away, but of course, there’s a catch… and that’s one part caviat emptor on my part, as I found that it does have the ability to use LANC… but it’s limited to zooming ONLY - no focusing control! … That’s one of the major advantages to using LANC in the first place, so that you can keep changing the shot to different parts of the yard if you need to — well, that’s a moot point with this camera, but as a camera itself, it’s not that bad! It does do very well with long-range shots with the lens that came with it (I haven’t gotten the extender, so I’m relying on the lens that came with it) and that means I can sit the camera half-way across the yard from where I’m shooting and still get a somewhat decent shot… as I did with this day. One other strange quirk with the L2 is that it does have the ability to use plug-in mics, and it does have the ability to manually adjust the level of the mics you plug in to it, but it doesn’t even pass the sound through to the outputs unless you’re recording in the camera! If you’re not rolling in the camera, it just shuts the entire sound section off entirely! Not very useful when you’re using it as a analogue input feed… So, yes, the sound isn’t that good with this edit, as I didn’t have a good camera to plug the shotgun mic into, but the day itself was pretty active!