Tales of Wonder and Woe: UWOL #1
 

sometimes the best part of shooting nature and outdoor video isn't the product, it's the process. the unintended footage, the surprises along the way, the discomforts large and small, the shot that got away from you....

how hot, wet, sweaty, tired, and exhausted you became...and how great the spiked hot chocolate tasted afterwards....here's your chance to commiserate with how much gear you carried and how far....

all i can say is, that since i posted the theme, i don't look at squirrels in quite the same way anymore!

Amen to that Meryem! lol... I love the thrill of nature and wildlife videography/photography. I cant wait to head out and start shooting for the UWOL challenge. I have seen nothing but rain here the past few days. And I am babying my new camera to much to take it out there. I have yet to get any protection lenses or a rain protection set for it.

I took these picture a few days ago, consider it a complement to the UWOL challenge. :D

~Gabriel

I started shooting today and now sit here wondering if I've lost my mind. Why am I doing this to myself...it's minus 25 a 30 mile per hour wind is blowing and on top of that the sun is only up for a few hours ...I'm crazy I've completely lost my mind. The living sky is overcast, grey and full of blowing snow. I quit, I give up hang me on the wall of shame.

Hold it the feeling is slowly returning to my fingers my God maybe just maybe I can get that shot tomorrow. I'm back in.....damn it Meryem your so right.

Brian

PS: The operating temperature listed for the XL2 is wrong.... way wrong!!!!

Minus 25!
 

You have got to be kidding.......

Take the day off for crying out loud, I did and it's 87 degrees, to hot and humid for a normal person to be carrying two cameras, 3 mics, reflector and telephoto lens all mounted on a DVRig. Ithink I will put my feet up in front of the air conditioner.

Oops, sorry

Jim

Jim I only wish I was kidding, the temperature is only a small part of the problem, I can dress for the cold. The shortness of the day is the real bugger. I only have 2 to 2.5 hours of usable sunlight this time of year.

You go ahead and put your feet in front of the AC and I'll stick mine in the oven LOL.

What the heck it's all in the name of having fun and learning a few new tricks along the way.

Brian

Brian, stay warm I know how you feel :-)
Right now it's +5 degrees celsius, rain, and the living sky is up there somewhere!
I'm doing some planning tonight to start shooting for the UWOL-challenge this weekend.
In meantime look at this wonderful shoot of the moon I got some days ago. Screencapture from Canon XLH1 and 500mm 4.0L lense, focal length 3600mm!

wow, nice pics, per and gabriel...i like the way this thread is shaping up, complete with pretty sky pictures to whet our appetites for the real thing....

i don't know how you folks up north do it....i get cold just reading about it!

Its not that bad where I live. Its just been raining all the time and we had a few really cold weeks about two weeks ago. that was fun. Lots of ice but no snow..

Nice video Per! Really nice stuff!

Keep up the good work! And don't give up guys!
~Gabriel

Wonderful shot Per....I wish we would get a clear sky while we have the full moon I have a new 500mm I want to try on the XL2 but this darn weather has been brutal lately.

I'm surprised it's +5 at your local I would have thought much colder..what is you latitude?

I'll do my best to keep warm....if all else fails I find booze works wonders LOL.

Brian

I can't comment on the XL2, but I ruined an XL1S in -24F in less than 2 hours. :-/ Canon did repair it under warranty though. OTOH, my HVX200 has handled such temps just fine, but it still makes me nervous. I'm also not recording to tape with the HVX and the P2 cards seem more robust in this regard.

Wow!

And to think I was excited about my moon shots with my new f/2.8 70-200mm L lens.

Down To It!!!
 

Hello Gang:

Well this is it for me tomorrow and Sunday to finish the shoot and next week for the edit, following that I'm out of town for a week then out of the country for a month.

Between all of us I think a pile of ones and zeros will be born this weekend.

All the best, if it's wildlife I hope it stays in frame, if it's inanimate I hope the shadow effects are perfect.

Brian

Heh...

I have yet to start shooting. I had my concept ready and I was set to go, but then had to cancel my plans for the shoot. Now it's snowing (again), and I can't get away this weekend (family event plus wrapping up a real project), putting me at Tuesday at the earliest that I can try again. I think I'll have to go back to the drawing board with a new concept since I've essentially lost an entire week. Oh, well...

...And that's my tale of woe.

wow, good for you, brian, for squeezing it out. we're having more white skies and snow here, ruinous to my plans...hoping to be able to piece together a back-up. we don't call it a challenge for nothin....

Looks like it's bad weather all over the globe. It has been raining here for a long time. Today it was some sun but at noon it was cloudy again and too low light to shoot anything.
It have been a very strange winter so far up here in the northern part of Europe. The snow is missing (only in the high mountains at the muskoxen you will find some). Average temperature is far higher than normal. It looks like this is a change of climate. Mother earth is warning us!

Give me a break
 

This is copied direct from my local weather....HELP...Just look at the Visability. May the force be with me!!!!!

Fog Depositing Ice
Temperature
-25°C
Pressure/ Tendency
100.8 kPa↑
Visibility
0.4 km
Humidity
71 %
Dewpoint
-28°C
Wind
NNW 5 km/h

Brian, my biggest sympathy for you!
Last night at 00.30 I managed to get a decent shoot of the moon. Looks like I have to stay up at night to get something to shoot here right now!

Picture is screen-capture from the XLH1 with a Sigma 300mm f/2.8 lense, 1/50, aperture 10

Per

These images are so impressive my God man the air must be clear!!!!

I can only hope that this ice fog will lift and allow me the opportunity to get the shots I need for the challenge. If all else fails I'll set up the camera pointing at a second story window of my house and I'll wave to the camera for three minutes LOL....now that my friend is wild life.

Per I'm not sure if I sent you this address before so just incase not I'll give it again.

http://www.nunavutmuskox.ca/

Brian

Yep... Very nice. I haven't had a clear view of the moon in days. Although yesterday morning at about 6:30AM here would have been nice to be outside with the camera. A Russian rocket entered the atmosphere and broke apart over Colorado and Wyoming and gave a pretty light show for about a minute. Too bad NORAD and the government said nothing about the event until after it happened. Grrr.... My neighbor saw it and tried to reach for his camera, but it was over before he got very far. Said it first looked like a meteor shower, then it became obvious it was something else like a satellite burning up or something. Saw some crappy pictures posted on the local news sites. Oh well...

It's still snowing here...

Not snowing (or 25 below) here, but waaaay to windy for any good diving right now. So I've been forced to do some topside shooting instead (ulp)

I guess that's at least one "good" thing that came out of signing up -- getting me out of my so-called comfort zone filming underwater :)

(although so far most of my footage is of various kinds of tree blowing in the wind ... all the birds seem to have been scared off)

Brian
This is the forcast for my area. For the last month this has been fairly common. It makes it a challenge with a long lens. But I always think things could be worst.

Wind warning in effect.
Tonight
Cloudy. Wind west 70 km/h gusting to 90 diminishing to 50 gusting to 80 this evening. Temperature steady near minus 1.
Saturday
Cloudy with sunny periods. Clearing late in the day. Wind west 60 km/h gusting to 80 diminishing to 40 gusting to 60 late in the morning. High plus 1.
Saturday night
Clear in the evening then cloudy periods with 30 percent chance of flurries late in the evening and overnight. Wind west 40 km/h. Low minus 5.

Per
I agree with Brian that you must have some clean air. Your moon shots are impressive.

Gordon Hoffman

Gordon

That's down right nasty weather for any lens but damn its real nasty for long shots, if you need to walk away from your tripod you best have sand bags with you LOL.

For a change my problem isn't the wind but believe it of not its the darn fog, a strange thing happened the temperature took a sudden jump and right now we have freezing rain. As Per suggested in an earlier post Mother Earth is Warning us, I totally agree. This time of year the ice on Hudson Bay should be six to eight feet thick but it's only three. If this keeps up the spring break up will come much too early could be bad for the King of the Ice and the other ice walkers.

Nick drop by and you can do some below the ice diving...just typing that and I got a chill

I reviewed my footage from the last couple of days....Crap describes it best.

Brian

Seattle has been a constant heavy rain for days now. Supposed to get an inch tonight and more through the weekend. I haven't been able to shoot anything. Doesn't look like much chance of a break anytime soon. I wonder if 'The Living Dead Skies' is acceptable ;)

Those moon shots warm the heart of this old moon child. Very nice.

Frame Grab
 

I finally found a few seconds worth keeping....Meryem....was that a maximum of three seconds or was that minutes.

Please say seconds LOL

Rain, rain, rain. Changed my idea so many times I forgot what I was shooting, nothing in the sky but white clouds and rain. Of course there was a meteor shower in Denver and a locust swarm in Mexico, but in Atlanta...rain. Get ready to see a LOT of rain shots. Bob

Brian
Freezing rain and fog! Watch your step. :-)

Gordon Hoffman

Well I've had 2 duff trips with a 'no show' by the spectacle I'm looking for.....so I've become a Researcher and found 2 places.

The best is a 400 Mile round trip :(

The other isn't going to be as spectacular but as times running out....I'm going to take a punt at it tomorrow night :)

RAIN RAIN GO AWAY....COME BACK ANOTHER DAY (Preferably after the 14th;)

We call that a 'Frog' around here...

Well, my "plan" was to get some nice U/W footage which currently is not happening (partly because all my dive buddies seem to have gone snowboarding)

so -- as per plan B -- I went out and waved the camera around topside today. I think I'm gonna have to retrofit some kind of "plan" around what footage I managed to get.

Hopefully diving is on for next weekend and I can make some kind of recovery. If not .. well, I dont think my entry will be too impressive.

-- And I definitely now realize that shooting topside is harder than I had thought (oh and I need to buy a tripod too :)

The Meteor shower in denver was invisible through the snow. :-P It was sunny today although still cold. A nice day with clear skies though, maybe I'll try to shoot something tonight, but I've been stuck inside all day finishing up rendering on an animation project. All I've been able to do is chat on the RED forum and devize plans B and C for this contest. Oh well...

I actually have a dive trip to BC planned in March -- we are gonna dive the chaudierre. Hopefully no ice picks needed!

I have about 75 mins of footage and no bloody idea what to do with any of it!

about the weather
 

Well, over here on latutude 62*N, wich goes, I think, right in the middle of Hudson Bay, too. The snow has yet to come this winter and the rain has been pouring doen for months now. This is no good for the Norwegian reputation. An old saying: Every Norwegian is born with ski on theyr feet.
Well, for me it's not only the wind, but the wind together with that "wet thing". My camera doesn't like that kind of combination very much :-( either do I. My wifes gardenflowers is blooming theese days, wich they shouldn't do until march/april. I don't like theese weather conditions at all, but we have to keep up the good fate in Mother earth. After all this is called a challenge and no one does it better than she does. We just have to catch it on tape guys :-)

I shot this november/december 2006 with my Panasonic DVX100 and the weather hasn't changed much since than: Storm is coming

brian, one of the distinctive things about this competition is that three good seconds could actually be a winner...because we all know how hard we work for those three seconds. three seconds can be a few minutes, a full day's hike, a week of sitting and waiting...or three weeks of waiting until that happy moment when camera, operator, and planet collide in some sort of miraculous moment that makes it to tape.

three seconds may have the "wow" factor that three minutes may not. and the "wow" factor is the essence of why we do what we do....

one of the best things about shooting nature and outdoor video is, that even if the video blows in the end--our camera is shaky, or the long lens is atmospherically challenged, or the hawk is out of focus, the experience is still our own forever....the planet revealed itself to us in some new transformative way, we get to see something which is familiar in a way that we never saw it before, eyeball to eyeball with the mystery....

Yes, well said Meryem... I guess that is what separates this group from the most all of the others at dvinfo. I can think of many times when I've but in hours to return mere seconds of something that I thought was special.

Well, I did it. I went out and shot some stuff. Unfortunately. Its not very sky like. most of its ducks. And snow. I think I need to get out tomorrow and start shooting more stuff. But hey, its a start.

The weather was the strangest thing today. One hour, I am out filming ducks in the sun (yes, we got sunlight), the next, its a dang blizzard! It was nice to be able to try and get some snow footage however. Something I have never tried before.

I hope ya'll are having good luck/blast.
~Gabriel

Well, I got a break in the weather. Actually had blue skies and some thin cloud wisps for the main location I had picked out. Two days later I made it to the location picked out for my intro but with misgivings; overcast with little hope of a patch or two of blue, but even with that I got 'er done.

Uploaded yesterday (I think, I've lost track of time...We finally got some of that cold from the fringes of that winter storm that hammered Oklahoma and Missouri).

I still have yet to shoot a single thing.... :-(

But that's what I'm doing tomorrow morning and much of the day wednesday and thursday if needed. It seems I'm either busy doing real work and can't go outside or it's snowing sideways. Weather was great today, just cold, but couldn't make it out. Tomorrow is supposed to be sunny as well so I'm hoping for the best.

Doing an UWOL project with a theme like this, at this time of year, and starting out with only 6 days remaining is well, uh, foolish. :D

I think I just won UWOL Challenge #1!
 

okay, so i'm not actually eligible to win the UWOL Challenge, but....

i had a bit of insomnia which summoned me out of the warm bed at 5 am. perfect, because i have managed to piece together exactly 3 shots so far for my non-eligible entry.

so i thought i might trudge around in the single-digit arctic cold and see if i could shoot a sunrise, even though the sunrise rarely looks like much from here. i need some footage, real bad!

i didn't get a thing. all i had to shoot was my HV10, which is a terrible low-light performer. everything looked noisy and grainy. all i had was the stock battery, which lasts about ten seconds, so by the time, the light was good, i was out of juice.

BUT BUT BUT!

the moon was about as beautiful as I have ever seen it. my 91 year-old shooting partner's crippling arthritis and various other health issues seemed to be on a "good" cycle, resulting in much tail-wagging and romping and general joie de vivre. we hiked up the closest trail to my house in the dark and had the whole world at our feet and the mountain to ourselves. not a scrap of useable footage resulted, but we had a priceless moment of happiness and serenity. like old times....

(homage to my shooting partner is online at http://ia300132.us.archive.org/1/ite...WideScreen.mov)

sharing a happy moment with V-dog and a camera in the mountains...priceless!

For some reason I can't see anything but the first few seconds of this. It freezes at the exact same point (hand reaching down past basket of flowers, dialog: "Did you remember...") everytime.

I've tried several times over the last two days.

You might resave/repost it just in case there's a "glitch" in the file.

I appreciate dogs...

Bruce

I noticed this too Bruce! I tried to watch it like, five minutes after you posted it. But it would freeze at the same point. So I was waiting to make sure it was not just my computer. Sorry Meryem!

I would like to see it.
~Gabriel