9 Foot Wing Span
 

Griffon Vulture is still my favourite bird in flight but compression from 69Mbs to 1.78Mb has removed the best out of this clip and I mean the image quality has suffered (the deleted audio was not important) ...

Brendan,

I really want to see that footage in full quality. I notice that you film the same pair of vultures. Curiously, do you go there for holidays and optimize what is there??? I love the overhead perspective.

My golden eagles seemed to have failed. My wife sees them most days but they have abandoned the nest site. In this country, if raptors leave their eyasses when small, horned owls slide in and kill them. I have found owl killed prairie falcons and swainsons. It is like they know where all the easy food is.

I think I as well as yourself, need to establish a web site so we can display any fine footage one finds, or one UWOL in full resolution.

Hello Dale
Original .avi file after editing is 69Mbs @ Bit Rate 1536kbps and Dimensions 720 x 576. If you really want that size file I'll try to attach it to an email.

Before posting the compressed clip above I tried 14 different settings in Quicktime but could not get the file size below 2Mbs. On top of that please note that the uncompressed .avi file plays noticeably sharper with Windows Media Player than with Quicktime. I'm assuming perhaps wrongly that you only use Quicktime so I've razored the clip in 2 halves and compressed them with Lg_Prog in Quicktime (@ Bit Rate 896 & Dimensions 480 x 360). I don't know whether Attachments will accept 2 items which add up to exceed 2Mbs but here goes ... if it only accepts one half per post I'll send the other half in next post!!

Brendan,

How about posting a HQ version on the IBC site

Bob

I'll give that a try Bob after posting some info on the location of vulture clips from Monfrague in Spain in which Dale seems to be interested.

Monfrague, spelt correctly, has 2 dots on the "u" so the National Park can't be found directly on Google Earth ... the nearest town is Serradilla and that comes up on Google Earth pronto ... just drag the map slightly to the left and you get 5 references to Monfrague within the National Park. The river Tagus nearby you can compare with this still from a helicopter and you'll see a sierra cut in 2 by the river. On the left flank there's a resident population of 130+ griffon vultures and about 30 roost to the right. Most of my vulture clips are taken from near the top of the right cliff ... over quarter of a million Europeans p.a. visit this spot with photographic/videographic/digiscopic gear ... there's no easy access to the left side of the sierra but the birds glide and soar obligingly across the river every morning and evening ... a great spectacle of graceful flight ... in the second still the nest is hidden in a large crevice on a ledge ...

Bob
I'm getting clips together to DVD to IBC including vulture & eagle flight.

In the meantime I followed your prompt and downloaded their HQ player, VLC media player 0.8.6b. I also upgraded my Quicktime Player to 7.1.6. When I played the original .avi 69Mb file on all 3 players I made the following observations:

Qt 7.1.6 All images slightly washed out. Noticeable blurring when cam. seemed to be adjusting focus because of sudden change in speed of flight.
VLC 0.8.6b All images slightly richer in colour than on Qt. Blurring less noticeable than on Qt.
Windows MP 11.0.5721 All images slightly sharper than on VLC. No blurring noticeable.

My wife's observation on the 3 playback versions without knowing my views was "The last one was clearer and steadier."

I tried out the Bee-eater .avi clip on the 3 players and found the colours on VLC to be as good if not richer than WMP; Qt showed images a bit washed out. Of course it may have to do with whatever settings (probably default) are controlling the 3 players; I don't know yet what to do about that.

Bendan,

I upload all my shots to "Rapidshare" and IBC download them and converted them. My photo jpeg files work out to be about 100mb for 20 seconds.

Waiting to view you HQ clips

Bob

If anyone sees a clip that shows under-wing as beautiful as this please let me know ...

Here is Bob Thompson's edition of the same photo ... I wonder how he brightened it up so well? My version looks dull by comparison; yet his version looks natural!

Brendan,

If you have photoshop cs2 the job is not difficult. What are you using?


goto Image control Adjust saturation, Hue Image below took 30 seconds to alter.

Nice job Dale, not having ever seen the bird in the flesh I wasn't game to touch the hue control as I know Brendan would pick any change in color immediately. I used Shadow/Highlight together with History brush. The history brush in conjunction with Snapshot is my most widely used tool.

Photoshop is an extremely powerful tool and it provides many ways to arrive at the same goal

Bob

So, what would you do with this much smaller raptor?

Here's Bob's version ... anyone dare to improve on this, please?

Not trying to make any excuses for my shot but it should be better but I am only running a 13" Macbook at home and it is difficult to judge the halo around the bird's wings when the shot is larger than my screen.

I just used an early version of Photoshop CS and shadow/highlights and the history brush.

Bob

Great kestrel shot!! really nice and colors look great.

Halo around the wings, couldn't you zoom it and smoooth out the pixels if that was an issue??

how would you work on that?

While I'm looking for excuses as well as "saturation" and other options on PSElements 7 (& wondering where I dumped my old CS2) would anybody identify the raptor in this photo AND the species of tree he is perched on?

Vulture Valse from Crete in 2006 ...

http://ts.vimeo.com.s3.amazonaws.com...712754_100.jpg

Brendan,

The picture looks like the owl, perhaps an eagle owl or long ear, was photoshopped in. I am not great with fauna, but that kind of plant is usally quite small.


Can you enlighten us??

Yes Dale, you are correct the owl was added into that image. Brendan, try using the edge refine tool for a hard edge around the owl, then scale your added image a little more suitable in proportin to the image you are adding it to. (meaning that plant is just that, a plant not a tree as you are lending the viewer to believe by adding the owl) This may help make it look less descerable if that is what you are trying to accomplish here.
For your underwing detail in your original image, try using the shadow/highlight tool in PS for those shadowed underwing shots, then adjusting everything else after that to your liking.

This looks like a completely staged image to me! I think it is a branch from a woody shrub - quite possibly a Euphorbia species - wedged in among a few small mossy rocks etc. A low quality image of some species of owl has then been "perched" using Photoshop.

Is this a trailer for April 1? Or did you over-indulge on St. Paddy's day Brendan?

OK. I'll try again. You're right about the Eagle Owl but what's the bush? And thanks for the practice; you can see I need it.

I will revise my opinion - the shrub is definitely not a Euphorbia - the flowers are not appropriate (you haven't superimosed those as well as the owl, have you Brendan?).

This time the shrub is clearly pasted into the image too -the rock to its left is not in focus, whilst both the shrub and the background are!

The shrub is not native to NW Europe, the Canary Islands, or New Zealand, I think. It may belong in Central or South America.

Bright spark Alan. Crassula sarcocaulis (mine is 15cm/6inches high) is native to low mountains of Transvaal, SA. [Euphorbia mellifera has similar shaped flower clusters.] A DOF of f/5 from 2 yards away meant that parts of crassula (& stone to left of it) are out of focus. Background was shot @f/8.

Thank you all for your specific comments and here I'm back to my favourite ...

Yes, I know Euphorbia mellifera from La Gomera and La Palma in the Canary Islands, but I have never seen it in flower. I have never seen a "woody" crassula, but Africa is the one continent that I have not been to.

You were born a couple of hundred years too late, Haast's Eagle would have been your favourite bird. Earlier this year, I was shown a partial skeleton found in a cave in the far NW of South Island, New Zealand. They had relatively short wings, ca 3 metres, for a bird thought to weigh as much as 15 kg.

Shucks, I've lost count now of the ones that got away since my camel kicked that dodo a while back ... my brief epitaph already reads ...

here lie the bones
of good ol' Bren
he hit the wall
and missed the hen

But here's a Grey Heron, 6ft wingspan. The only adjustment has been to crop the original from size 33% to size 50% ...

And me after breaking my butt to freeze my solo heron, along comes Bob Thompson with the Hong Kong version of the same species ... BUT, there's TWO of them and they're playing LEAPFROG while croaking God Save King Kong ... what next!

Is it possible to tell which of these has a 6ft wingspan and which has a 9ft wingspan without a common denominator?

Brendan,


I know the birds so it is an easy call; however one really needs something to compare them to in order to get a sense of size from the picture. That is not real easy to accomplish.

with vultures i have often seen them soaring with other birds and that would be a great opportunity to get size comparisons if the bird were easily recognizable like a gull or such.

with uniform back ground one could shop in a gull rather easily. give it a try.


Brendan I am truly enjoying your stills. would like to see more of your video on vimeo or such.

2 clips, XL2 (or XM2 ?) on tripod so not as jumpy as usual ....

Griffon Vultures ins & outs on Vimeo

Griffon Vultures landing on Vimeo

Thanks for the push, Dale

Brendan,

The IN and Outs is pretty awesome!! the landing one could use a little enhancement as it is rather dark, but still nice.

Keep at those vultures and keep working on getting flying sequences!! They are always the hardest.

Have you started building a project of you best clips? You must have enough footage by now!! Cut me a dvd when you do!!

I have been in the editing room 7 or more hours a day for the last week building an hour and a half video, labor intensive. I need to unplug and go find an eagle or such to film!!

Bearded Vulture
 

I have not started building a project yet Dale but I just found someone whose ideas I may try to adapt. His rare bird is a lammergier with a wingspan of nearly 10ft ... very scarce vulture. More details at birdinginspain.com and here's 8 min video in 40Mbs ...

Spalywood Filmproduction

Brendan, Thanks for the link to that video. I would love to go there

Bob

... for flight sequences I can still only offer this sort of handheld XM2 ...

An adult soaring | the Internet Bird Collection

... from western Spain and maybe better from Crete on the same site. The Bearded Vulture was filmed (not by me) on mid-slopes of Pyrenees

Brendan,


Hand held???? If so you have a lot steadier hand than I do!!!

Shows you the old gl2/xm2 can still get some awesome footage, even if we haved moved onward to slightly higher level cameras!!!

Black Vulture 9ft+
 

I'm off for 3 weeks to get a 10sec uncluttered flight sequence of this beauty, if I'm lucky ...