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!

 

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