Just trying out the new cam. Fun.

Stalking a Bee while it mollests my apple tree blossoms
http://208.109.166.78/misc/beetime.zip

Cactus Bloom at 20,000% speed
http://208.109.166.78/misc/cactus8k.mov.zip

looks like the bee time one isn't working. it says searching for data in "beetime.mov" as well as "Newborn.m4a" make sure it's not a ref movie.

That bee footage is really nice. Is that macro with the stock HV20 lens or is there a macro adapter on there? How far from the bee were you?

I wasn't able to open either in quicktime, but they did play fine with the VLC media player.

Great macro footage and time laps. Would love to know how you did both of those. :) Thanks for sharing.

Just like others i had some strange anomalies with the macro footage. But managed to get it to play good enough to watch.

Excellent footage Jason. Especially like the shots of the bee. Must have been a tame bee to let you get that close.

I'm terribly sorry about that guys. I was lazy and edited it all just in quicktime pro and didn't see that i was resourcing the audio track and a 2nd clip instead of imbeding. I had to Save As instead of just Save to flatten it completly. I've tested it in Windows (parallels) as well now and works fine. I updated to link in the first post.

the bee footage was done with the stock lens and handheld. so my camera was about 1 inch from the bee. he paid very little attention to me.

Hey Jas, did you get nervous getting that close to the bee? Nice stuff though.

the bee footage was done with the stock lens and handheld. so my camera was about 1 inch from the bee. he paid very little attention to me.

As a beekeeper, I have to tell you that 'she' paid very little attention to you. (hehe)

Male bees, known as drones, have no stinger, and their proboscis is too short to gather nectar. They do have very large eyes so that they can find the queen to mate with her on her mating flight (the only time she leaves the hive unattended). The sad part is, the male that mates with the queen pays for it with his life. Another sad note for drones is that they can't do any work to maintain the hive so when winter comes and it's time to downsize, guess who gets kicked out into the cold to die.

The reason 'she' paid very little attention to you is because she is not guarding her hive and has no interest in stinging you unless you grab her or she feels like she is getting squished. She will die if she stings and survival instinct means using it as a last resort.

-gb-

Great info Greg. Thanks.

I didnt get very nervous Ken after the first couple of flowers. I did jump back twice when she flew towards me but that was to get to this other flower. I spent about 8min recording her and must have flew to 20 different flowers in that time.

Great info Greg. Thanks.

I downloaded the video after my DSL connection came back up. Very nice! This HV20 is a winner afaik.

-gb-

Jason, would you be so kind as to break down in more detail how you achieved the time lapse? Was it in camera or post-production? Also, white balance and aperture don't seem to be changing as the light changes. How did you adjust that?

Thanks a lot.

I set the camera infront of the flower for 1 hour and hit record. I set the aperture manually to F8 and set Manual focus. I then imported my footgate into final cut and dragged my video onto the timeline and rightclicked on the clicp and selected speed and entered 60000%. Saved it out as a MOV. I didn't touch white balance in camera or post. it was set to automatic.

I did a new time lapse today of just one flower.

http://208.109.166.78/misc/cactussolo1080p.zip

very nice Jason. Thanks for sharing in depth info. Its great to learn that your macro stuff was done with a stock HV20 and nothing else! Steller camera. getting your second Timelaps now. :)

Yeah these are fantastic videos! I'm curious what your shutter speed was on the bee video. Downloading your next one, and please keep posting these "stock HV20" videos... it's great to see how things look out of the box. I'm 90% sold on this camera over any other.

amazing footage

Im am struggling to keep my footage is such sharp focus while zoomed in

Steve, the shutter was set to auto but to capture the high speed of the bee i actually separated my interlace fields makeing it 60FPS. then i cut the speed down to %50. i think this effect worked extremly well with the bee.

I must admit, the camera took about 3 seconds sometimes to focus on the bee when moving to a new flower. it wasn't so bad that i needed to move to manual focus. but thought I should mention it. I may try this again but switch it to standard auto focus. That might work better then Instatn auto focus since the camera is physically so close to the subeject that the iAF sensor might be point at the wrong thing. cause from what i understand, standard AF comes from the lens.

Good info there Jason, and I would very much be interested in seeing a manual focus on the same type of subject. The HV20 is just a show stopper at close shots, and when it was in focus the bee looked really sharp.

Thanks again!