Sat 11 Nov 2006
November 11, 2006 - Up-shot success!
Posted by Zach Glenwright under Backyard Bag Feeder Project, Birds, Edited Feeds (SD), Squirrels, Vertical Feeder2 Comments
I’m not sure if anyone visiting here is interested or not in my up-shot stuff, but just in case, I’m posting it anyway… 
I left the camera running from Thursday to Saturday, and nothing much happened… until Saturday morning. I finally got an up-shot angle on tape of something that was interested in my hanging bag feeder - a waxwing! This year is a first for them here - I’ve seen them once or twice before on the ground version of my Backyard Bag Feeder Project, but very infrequently… Very cool! You can see all of the waxwing visits in the first video below, along with a few shots of squirrels yawning (especially the first shot of the video)…
A waxwing getting a nut from the bag feeder!
As I was getting ready to shut everything down (it’s supposed to rain here again…), I looked out of the window and saw the bag was tilted sideways on the tree - “I didn’t put it that way!” - and there was a squirrel, finally curious enough about the feeder to take a nut (a few, actually) out of the hanging version! I also got some video Sunday morning (I recorded it from a window in the rain) of another squirrel getting some nuts out of the feeder, but I don’t have that video edited yet and quite honestly don’t really feel like working with it now… It took Chris’s squirrels a week to figure out the initial version of his Pillow Feeder, and it’s taken my squirrels a week to figure out this version of my Feeder project… The 2nd video at the bottom is a few shots of the squirrel getting some nuts out of the bag.
My first hanging squirrel getting a nut!
I wonder if they’ll stay interested… I noticed about an hour ago as I was setting things up again that the squirrel feeder that the bag feeder was hanging on is extremely loose from it’s base, so I moved the feeder bag back over to the birdfeeder area. I wonder if they’ll be as interested in the new place - it’s now hanging where the food is more visable, my camera’s sitting on the ground (completely covered up - it’s supposed to rain again, but I’m taking a chance) and I have nuts sticking out from the bag to see if they’ll venture over that way.
BBFP 11-11-06 Upshot, Birds, 450Kbps Version [4:44m]: Play Now | Play in Popup BBFP 11-11-06 Upshot, Squirrels, 450Kbps Version [3:32m]: Play Now | Play in Popup
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…
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!
All right! A crow is now interested in my project to come back every day! It’s about time! I can finally make a project for the crows to play with! But it was not to be. This was the last day the crow came to the backyard and to my project. I’m not sure why it stopped coming. Maybe it found a better source of food? Maybe it died? Eh - marital issues? (OK, really doubt it…) But this was it. It was back to squirrels only for the rest of the summer…
Amazed that a crow decided to come to my yard twice, I decided to put all of the cameras back out again. Maybe it would come a 3rd time?? I prepared a project filled with bread (I find they like that the most) and sat it out. Within 6 minutes, a squirrel came and destroyed the whole thing! Interesting, because I didn’t think they liked bread - and they (or at least this one) didn’t! I made another project and sat it out, hoping that the crow would again chance at getting “a piece of it” - and it came back again! 3 days in a row!!! It also came back 3 times that day! A first! I also had the shot from 3 different angles this time (and with much better sound!) And finally, I got a true display of what crows will do to get to the bread inside the project itself! Very interesting watch.
On the 8th, after seeing the crow, I took the main camera in but decided to let the secondary one out in it’s place, just in case it decided to come back — it didn’t. But I kept it out anyway. I didn’t really feel like doing a set-up on the 9th, so I just left everything from the previous day sit there, once again hoping that it might take another chance at it. Sure enough, at 9am that morning, the crow came back, punctual and just as interested. The shot isn’t as nice and the sound sucks, but there it is again, trying once again to get food from the project! It pecked at it a few times and even stood on top of it towards the end!
The night of the 7th I had a huge complaint that there were no grackles this year. Every year since I started the project, I could pretty much count on them being there in June. Cut to the next morning, I was just sitting there watching a squirrel finish eating, around 9am. The camera was zoomed in after watching the squirrel feed, and I zoomed out to get a wider view (in case another squirrel wanted to come back) and what should I see? Yes, that’s right - a crow! I have always wanted to see what a crow would do with the project (and if it would be interested at all, for that matter) and this proved likewise! Of course, it didn’t really do anything to the project itself, but just to see a crow in my backyard is cool enough! (Yes, that’s right, I have no life… :))
Another shot I did just… because… I had a little time after my typical setup, so I threw the camera on a tripod with the panhead and just sat it at the bird feeder for about an hour and a half. Just to see what would come, I let it run it’s course. In the time I had the camera running, I had a few squirrels try to get food from the feeder (along with some very good closeup shots of one eating from it), a few nice ground shots (from earlier in the day) and a cardinal even decided to show up! — that’s a rare occurance to get on tape, period, but there it is!
The main reason I included this video in the collection is because of the closeups I got (mainly in the beginning) and the squirrel profile shots… I changed the setup slightly (I moved the $10 camera to a tripod so that the Squirrel Critic couldn’t switch angles on me again…) and I got a shot or 2 of a robin that passed by… This day isn’t one of the most exciting days (nights, actually - I found that the best time for squirrel activity at this specific time of this specific year was night), but it’s still a pretty good day edit, and it shows off another angle for a shot (this time the 2nd angle was looking sideways instead of back towards the project) - it would be nice to do the whole “matrix” thing with my angles, but somehow I doubt that 2 cameras would work for that…
On the night of July 19th, 2004 I decided I would wake up early and set the project for out the next day. Simple. Wake up at 6, set the cameras up and wire everything outside, start the computers capturing and go inside to watch over the project - I recently set up a second computer to capture both cameras directly to DV-NTSC so I wouldn’t have to capture anything later on, just throw the files on the timeline, sync the 2 raw DV files to each other in Final Cut and save me half the work - one day of the project can take up to 3 weeks or so to completely finalize, most taking at least 4 hours to edit completely. The last day’s edit of the project this year, September 2nd, wasn’t finalized until mid-November. Anyway, I woke up at 5:30, not at all in the mood to do anything. I set the cameras up, half-asleep, put the platform out with some nuts, falling over about 4 or so times on the wires and almost knocking over the cameras twice, went inside and started the computers (after screwing with the connection to one of them for 10 minutes - the cable didn’t work), fixed the audio (it had a real annoying buzz in the signal), etc., etc., etc. and went back to bed. Nothing really amazing happened during the time I tried to get back to sleep (nope, I didn’t get back to sleep…) so I went back to check on the project… 
OK! June 8, 2004. This is the big one - the one for the books in 2004. The final edit of this day is over an hour long! And the project itself was well attended by both grackle and squirrel alike! This is the last day for the grackles of 2004, probably because right after that there were 2 weeks of constant rain that completely hindered me putting any cameras or projects outside. 
Yet another grackle day. I never get tired of them… Only this one isn’t as much grackle-attended as it was squirrel-attended - the squirrel got pretty much most of the food… Of course, the squirrels need (well, OK, not need, but…) food too…! Maybe the grackles are getting lazier? NOTE: This is a COMPLETE DAY FEED - it’s a long-ish file, 5 minutes long.
Similar (almost exactly) to the 31st’s project. To the letter. Same cameras basically, same kinds of food, basically, and same kind of project, basically. What’s different? Not much… But there are still grackles around and it’s still freaking cool… and Whitetail returns to the scene!
After the success of the bread-and-butter taping of the 30th, I decided to put another project together. This time, with all of the fanciness and frills and, well, effort, that gets put into a normal project. And this time with a much better camera (2 actually) - and a microphone placed near the mat - I don’t get grackles that often, so when they come, I want to record it as well as I can. Well, they did come, and here you have the second grackle day of 2004! One specific one kept making an appearance with a small bit of guano on it’s tail - thusly it was dubbed “Whitetail the Grackle”… NOTE: This is a COMPLETE DAY FEED - it’s a long file, 17 minutes long.
I did a test run during the morning of May 30, 2004 just to see if anything would come. I had an old project sitting around, so I stuck it (kind of) in the ground and put some food on top of it. See, the plan was to put out a completely made project and do everything to set it up, all cameras and etc., but I was tired as hell. So I decided if I was going to do anything I might as well do well, something… So I put out the sample project, and that was good enough for me at the time. On my ’sample’ project, grackles (which are a rarity around here) kept coming to the mat and pecking at the holes that were already in the old project - enough so I got tired of them looking for things that didn’t exist (there wasn’t that much food on the platform, just enough to test what’s around), so I put a very quick project together and stuck some peanuts on top of it…