Here is some recent footage of one of the more common native flycatchers of New Jersey, the Eastern Phoebe. Like most flycatchers of our area, this little drab bird spends its time gleeming the air and ground for live insects and will often perch on branches just above their food sources.
This footage was shot with the Tamron SP 150-600mm VC lens and the Canon EOS 7D DSLR on a Manfrotto tripod with fluid head. For best audio and video quality, select 1080p on the YouTube settings.
Here is some DSLR nature footage that I shot in the tail end of this summer in New Jersey. This was one of my first times using a fluid head on a tripod, and I practiced smooth vertical and horizontal panning motions to avoid jitters in the video. The YouTube video below is a splice of 3 separate angles of a Great Spangled Fritillary in butterfly, a species I consider one of our most regal flighty residents.
Please watch in 1080P for full resolution
Equipment used in filming and production: Tamron SP 90mm VC F/2.8 1:1 Macro Lens, Canon EOS 60D DSLR, Manfrotto 700RC2 Mini Video Fluid Head, Manfrotto 055x ProB Tripod.
The acoustic guitar is my Washburn D10 CE using mostly Major 7th chords.
It was a real treat to get some close footage of our vibrant state bird recently. I knew that I would want footage from several different angles to create diversity… even in a short wildlife video. Varying the focal lengths and my angle of view on the birds was how I tackled that challenge.
Footage shot in 1080p at 30fps on the Canon EOS 7D with the tripod mounted Tamron SP 150-600mm VC zoom lens. DSLR was set to the desired shutter speed of 1/60th of a second and I adjusted the aperture and ISO value to get as good of an exposure as possible for each clip. Unfortunately it was a windy day so I had to strip the audio of the birds interacting and feeding. I don’t think anyone would have enjoyed listening to the hissing and popping caused by the wind hitting the microphone outdoors.
A short guitar video (of myself) that I recorded and edited recently in New Jersey.
Manually prefocusing two cameras on the position my guitar would be at was a challenge in itself. I actually took a cardboard box from a photography light stand and laid it in place as a marker for focusing. Took me about 3 tries to really guess exactly where my Ibanez guitar would be. I had external microphones from both cameras wired fairly close to where my small guitar amplifier was on the ground.
After setting the manual video exposures on both cameras, I started rolling and slid myself into position. Took me about 7 minutes on this take to get a 45 second musical passage that I was happy enough with.
Video post-processing first involved syncing the full 7 minute clips by matching peaks on the audio waveforms. After that, it was a matter of cutting to whichever video feed I wanted to be viewed for the guitar part being played. I did some color corrections, highlight tweaks, and selective saturation before rendering out the AVI file.
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Dave Blinder Nature Photography 