I have recently discovered that birds are fun to film. I have no idea why. Maybe it's because, being a beginner at all of this, filming them is still a challenge for me, or maybe it has something to do with how easy it is to find birds. Like I said, I have no idea why I like filming them, I just do. Anyway, they serve as a great marker for my improvement in filming. As you may recall from one of my previous posts, I took a video of a robin that was very shaky and somewhat out of focus. It was very difficult for me to film it with a tripod, so I ended up just going without it. Over my spring break, I decided that I would try to film some birds using my tripod. At first, it was difficult. Whenever I tried to get to close to the birds, they would simply fly away. It didn't help that the birds would only remain in the same location for a very brief period of time. Usually by the time I had my camera actually mounted to the tripod, the birds would have already moved on to another branch, this time far out of my camera's reach. To fix this problem, I ended up leaving my camera connected to my tripod and keeping them in reach of my back porch. As a result, I was able to capture several different kinds of birds without them ever knowing I was there. They still would move fairly often, but I managed to get three decent shots of the birds standing still:
The first bird I was able to capture was a blue jay. Although my view of him was obstructed by branches, I was still able to maintain a decent level of focus on him.
I'm pretty sure the birds in this next video are a type of pigeon. Once again, a small branch was in my way. The branch was a lot less of a problem compared to the ones in the previous video, but it still made a difference. I was just happy to have been able to film two birds sitting next to each other. I've never been able to film that before.
This final video is of a cardinal sitting on a tree branch. Fortunately, no other branches were in the way this time. The cardinal spends most of the video sitting with his back to the camera. Towards the end, however, he turns to face the camera and chirps. At the end, the cardinal flies away.
I'm going to be filming more wildlife in the following weeks, so stay tuned for more videos....
For those of you reading, you may have noticed that I haven't posted anything since the beginning of my spring break. Unfortunately, my laptop just hasn't been able to handle the stress of editing videos. It has been overheating to the point where it just shuts off entirely whenever I do pretty much anything graphically intensive on it. So, I've just had to let all my videos sit on my video camera.
Pictured Above: What happens when I try to get anything done
I did a bunch of research and found out that my type of computer is notorious for its overheating issues. Both the GPU and CPU in my laptop are coated with a special kind of thermal paste. This paste prevents both parts from becoming too hot. Here's the problem: Asus, the company who made my laptop, is known for their shoddy pasting jobs. The thermal paste that they used was simply not applied correctly. Thus, I'm left with a half-functioning laptop. Fortunately, the problem can be fixed relatively cheaply, so I lucked out there. In the meantime, I have temporarily fixed the issue by updating my video drivers and spraying out the fans with condensed air. I am in the process of uploading all my videos right now, so I should have multiple posts up by sometime tomorrow.
