Friday at the Flicks - 2nd Bees on Sunflower

The previous post has a macro video taken with the Nikon Coolpix S9050. I had been looking around to see if there were any dedicated macro video camcorders when I thought - try the 50D now it is loaded with Magic Lantern which allows it to take video, even if only silent:



I fitted the Sigma 28-80mm macro lens and kept Magic Lantern to shooting 4:3 format. The first part of the video was taken as close as I could get. I still want to be able to get closer so will keep experimenting and looking. At the moment I am investigating the Raynox DCR-150 add on macro lens which seems to have good reviews. There are quite a few ideas for investigation on the UntamedScience website.

Friday at the Flicks - Busy Bee

Plenty of bee visitors to the Sunflowers which have been 'planted' by careless birds visiting the feeders:



I was fascinated by the way this bee was methodical as it worked its way round the Sunflower flower. Two clips played in reverse order.

WPanorama

I did a bit of searching last night and came up with an alternative to Panolapse. Namely the freeware program WPanorama which doesn't need any copies to be made of the panorama to convert it to a video. Just drag and drop the photo to the program window!

Again the original panorama:



Video produced.
It ended up as a two stage process as WPanorama makes very large AVI files. In this case 775MB! So, I plonked that AVI file in trakAxPC, zoomed it slightly, added the text and saved it as an mp4 for YouTube. Now only 20.4MB. In fact almost any video editor / converter would do the job:




What I did find out about WPanorama - don't choose too large a screen size for the AVI. When I chose 1280 x 720 the program split the end result into several files as it seems to have a maximum size of 1.99GB for its output files. For the above example I set the size to 640 x 360.

Clouds

A couple of days ago I took a series of shots looking across the cricket field. Five overlapping shots were stitched using ICE to make a panorama:



Then 377 copies of that were made so it could be made in to a video panning panorama using Panolapse:

Macro on Monday - Guess What

A full house this time with Adrian, Sue Garrett, TexWisGirl, ImaBurdie and Ragged Robin all gaining the virtual Gold Star for identifying the Sunflower in last week's Guess What:








Back to a scrambled photo this week.
Guess What:


Clue: Not carried by the knights of old.

Guesses left in the comments will be revealed next Monday along with the answer.
No prizes - just for fun.

When the Wind Blows

Funny how the mind works.
This morning's find instantly brought to mind the nursery rhyme:

Rock-a-bye baby, in the treetop
When the wind blows, the cradle will rock
When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall
And down will come baby, cradle and all

I was clearing up under the old leylandii tree when I spotted something which had fallen:

Side view:


Back view:


Top view:


I have no idea which bird built this nest. It measures about 6 inches across and 4 inches deep. (15cm x 10cm) Fortunately there was no baby to fall with it. By the looks of the variety of material and the intricate way it has been built it must have taken quite a while to construct.

Friday at the Flicks - Bees on Buddleia

A couple of days ago I was processing some cloud photos in Elements. As I finished tweaking the final one the program suddenly grabbed all memory and locked up. A forced closure and restart showed that all the work had been lost. I couldn't be bothered to go through it all again.

Looking around for other photo processing software I found Paint.NET, a free program so downloaded it along with some extra free effects plug-ins to try it out. Here are a couple of early trials:

The originals:
     
Both can be enlarged.

The finished results, foreground deliberately kept dark:




Only the one video this week. While the large buddleia bush was in full flower it attracted plenty of bumble bees:



Unfortunately it has now finished flowering.

Have a great weekend observing the world around you.