Friday 4 July 2014

Friday at the Flicks - Roosting Again + Bottoms Up + Panorama Experiment

After an absence of six nights the Wren spent another night sleeping in the roosting pocket.




Walking past a tub filled with Pinks in full bloom I noticed how deep the Bumble Bees had to go to get at the nectar. Good for the plant as it forces the hairy bee to brush against the pollen which will get carried to other plants to fertilise the embryonic seeds.



Some flowers are easier than others for a large Bumble Bee to gain entrance to the nectar.  Phil Gates in his blog Cabinet of Curiosities has just explained with beautiful close up photos how hard they have to work to get in the flowers of the Foxglove. See Bumblebees and the Foxglove Challenge.


Yet another experiment. The iMovie Mac app has a zoom facility called the Ken Burns effect which allows me to very easily fix a start point and size along with a finish point and size to give zoom and / or pan effects to movies or stills. This experiment started with one of my old panorama shots taken with the iPhone:

2014-05-03 14.35.42

Pasted in iMovie and the Ken Burns crop / zoom effect applied to give a panned video view across the still picture:

Screenshot 2014-07-02 at 08.46.45 am



I will have to take some more detailed panoramas around the area and see how they look as pseudo videos.

Have a great weekend observing the wildlife around you.

6 comments:

  1. John, good to see the Wren back. The sound on the Bumble Bee is brilliant.
    The App is good and effective. I can do it in either Lightworks or Photoshop but I bet it would take me an hour or so. My start resolution would have to be horrendous. Three years ago I didn't know what Key Frames where. If I bought a Mac I wouldn't need to.
    I just like playing....I doubt I'll ever be any good at it.

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    Replies
    1. Adrian: I wonder why the wren chooses there every so often.
      The bee was filmed with the Nikon and it was only a few inches away so captured the sound beautifully. In fact I reduced the volume by 50%!
      iMovie is fairly good basic video editing software considering it s included with the operating system on the Mac. Titling leaves a lot to be desired yet but they do keep updating it. For YouTube I only need something which is quick and easy as I am often in a hurry to get the thing done and uploaded ready for the next day.

      Delete
  2. This was a fun assortment today, John.

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  3. glad the wren returned! just love a cute little bee butt!

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Thank you for visiting. Hope you enjoyed the pictures. Any comment, or correction to any information or identification I get wrong, is most welcome. John

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