Bob Richardson
October 25th, 2009, 11:55 AM
Last Monday I decided to go for a little hike and get some practice recording nature with the HM700. (I originally wrote "shooting nature" but that didn't seem right...) It was also an opportunity to try out my Porta-Brace hiker's backpack.
I went to Wahclella Falls, which is about 40 miles east of Portland, Oregon, in the Columbia River Gorge. The falls are about a mile hike up from the base of the park, and the hike itself is quite beautiful, basically you follow a muddy trail along the small canyon all the way up to the falls.
Much of the area is spring-fed, and there are portions of the canyon walls that appear to "sweat" water into lush, thick moss.
Here's the final result on Vimeo:
"Confluence" on Vimeo (http://www.vimeo.com/7244501)
(The style is 100% candy-coated new age cheesiness -- if you're turned off by motion control tricks in editing, and an overuse of focus rolls, you're gonna hate this -- that's OK, you're right of course, but it's just an exercise!)
Production notes:
The format was 1280x720, 30p. Most everything is at 1/60th shutter, although to get detail on some of the falling water, especially the main descending close-up of the waterfall, I used as high as 1/250th. The result was darker, but I got more detail in the fast moving, rough water.
Even though it was a few hours before sunset, the angle of the canyon and the angle of the autumn sun prevented direct light from reaching where I was shooting. All of the ambient light was basically reflected down off an overcast sky. So I had to have the iris opened up a lot more than I would have liked, usually below F4 and often fully open.
One of my mistakes was assuming that after I had white balanced in a couple of locations and achieved the same result, that the color temp. would be consistent -- this was not, in fact, the case, so I did have to do a fair amount of color correcting (and gamma correcting, too, for shots with a high shutter speed) in Final Cut.
(Past experience with the HM700 has taught me that using gain is suicidal -- there's just too much grain, and it doesn't look like a natural grain at all. So nearly everything here is shot without gain and then adjusted for brightness in editing.)
I wish I had obtained more raw footage of the main waterfall itself -- the final video doesn't spend enough time with it. At the site, I found myself having to clean the lens between every shot, there was so much wind (generated by the waterfall itself) and mist that the lens would be coated in about 20 seconds, so I moved further away after getting only a couple of close shots of the waterfall base area. Do they make windshield wipers for these things?
I tried not to include any man-made features in the final edit, but one did creep in -- can you spot it?
Feedback/critiques are appreciated. If anyone would like to examine a particular original raw clip file, let me know and I'll put it somewhere you can download it.
I went to Wahclella Falls, which is about 40 miles east of Portland, Oregon, in the Columbia River Gorge. The falls are about a mile hike up from the base of the park, and the hike itself is quite beautiful, basically you follow a muddy trail along the small canyon all the way up to the falls.
Much of the area is spring-fed, and there are portions of the canyon walls that appear to "sweat" water into lush, thick moss.
Here's the final result on Vimeo:
"Confluence" on Vimeo (http://www.vimeo.com/7244501)
(The style is 100% candy-coated new age cheesiness -- if you're turned off by motion control tricks in editing, and an overuse of focus rolls, you're gonna hate this -- that's OK, you're right of course, but it's just an exercise!)
Production notes:
The format was 1280x720, 30p. Most everything is at 1/60th shutter, although to get detail on some of the falling water, especially the main descending close-up of the waterfall, I used as high as 1/250th. The result was darker, but I got more detail in the fast moving, rough water.
Even though it was a few hours before sunset, the angle of the canyon and the angle of the autumn sun prevented direct light from reaching where I was shooting. All of the ambient light was basically reflected down off an overcast sky. So I had to have the iris opened up a lot more than I would have liked, usually below F4 and often fully open.
One of my mistakes was assuming that after I had white balanced in a couple of locations and achieved the same result, that the color temp. would be consistent -- this was not, in fact, the case, so I did have to do a fair amount of color correcting (and gamma correcting, too, for shots with a high shutter speed) in Final Cut.
(Past experience with the HM700 has taught me that using gain is suicidal -- there's just too much grain, and it doesn't look like a natural grain at all. So nearly everything here is shot without gain and then adjusted for brightness in editing.)
I wish I had obtained more raw footage of the main waterfall itself -- the final video doesn't spend enough time with it. At the site, I found myself having to clean the lens between every shot, there was so much wind (generated by the waterfall itself) and mist that the lens would be coated in about 20 seconds, so I moved further away after getting only a couple of close shots of the waterfall base area. Do they make windshield wipers for these things?
I tried not to include any man-made features in the final edit, but one did creep in -- can you spot it?
Feedback/critiques are appreciated. If anyone would like to examine a particular original raw clip file, let me know and I'll put it somewhere you can download it.