GL2 Frame stills...hawk eating prey!!!

[Graham Bernard]

We now have foxes, wandering about central London! We often have one lope through our back garden in Wembley!

Grazie

[Derrick Begin]

Steve,

Beautiful work... The detail is awesome. Such is nature...

Add me to your email list (s) and keep me posted of your endeavors.

Cheers!

Derrick

[Steve Nunez]

Thanks so much guys for the nice compliments.

It does take quite a bit of effort and patience to get any sort of useable footage worthy of making into a video...thanks to the lightweight and great battery efficiency of the GL2- the effort seems well worth it.

I've added a link to video short showing the rough times raptors in NYC have in acquiring prey. In the clip a Cooper's hawk attempts to catch a bird and just doesn't seem to have it together- to make matters worse- the hawk tries to catch this prey during medium snowfall.....I hope you guys like the clip. Go to the regular hawk clip as linked at the beginning of this thread- and when you get to the page where the redtail hawk video is posted- you'll see text linking you to the Cooper's hawk clip- enjoy!

(PS- Thankfully the Firestore is working manually and I'm not shooting tapes anymore- makes the long recording sessions cost effective when shooting for an hour+ for 10 seconds of useable footage!)

[Steve Hagan]

Great video Steve. Makes me want to grab my GL2 and go sit in the woods to try and film some action in the wild.
Show us more.

[Steve Nunez]

Thanks Steve.

It's terribly cold out (19`) and sadly no new footage for today.....I have tons of footage on file and can always put stuff together. Most of my video is of hawks with some owls and insect video as well.....I have a few clips posted on my site- stevenunez.com .....just don't expect too much- this is all a hobby for me- just having fun!

Enjoying the GL2 very much...can't wait for 60 degree+ weather!

You nature guys should all go out and shoot some video...I bet even pigeons could be made into a good subject for video should someone try.

~~We should have weekly challenges on this board- how about it Chris? Weekly assignments for the entire board to tackle and post- would be great fun.

[Rob Lohman]

I noticed an "effect" I've seen before and was wondering what
other people think of it. When looking at your footage look
closely at the sky (especially surrouding the tree). In my view/
opinion it doesn't look right. It looks off color and perhaps a bit
over exposed? Now I'm not trying to say this is a bad video or
anything, it is just something I've seen a couple of times before
(on my own footage too, especially with my digital still camera)
and was wondering where this comes from. My gut says the
auto white balancer is acting up here.... Any thoughts on this?

[Steve Nunez]

I think what you're referring to is called "Chromatic abberation"....it's common amongst digital capture devices such as digital cameras and camcorders- I believe it's caused by the camera's interpretation of contrasting edges and it's luminance/chroma values- in digital camera circles it's also referred to as "color fringing".....exposure settings and CCD quality affect the final output- in my case that footage was shot in "Easy/Green Box" mode- I think the camera made a pretty good, on the fly adjustment of available parameters to make what it thought was the best settings to render the footage well- I'm willing to bet that if i were to shoot the same footage in manual mode- with careful selection of aperature (Iris) and shutter speeds- I can vary the intensity of this fringing and possibly make the abberation disappear altogether......but overall the GL2 did a good job- but I did too notice the abberation.

Just my guess this is what you are referring to.

[Rob Lohman]

Okay... thanks. I hadn't considered that possibility. By chromatic
abberation you are probably reffering to the blue-like lines you
are seeing surrounding the tree branches, right? What more caught
my eye was a feeling that the color of the sky on these regions
is a tad to blue/green instead of blue. You think this might be
chromatic abberation as well?

[Chris Hurd]

Steve, I wonder if you can upload -- or send to me via email -- four or five full-size (720x480) frames, as uncompressed jpeg's.
It looks like the largest ones on your page are 555x370. Thanks in advance,

[Steve Nunez]

Chris,

I've recapped a bunch of stills from that short video sequence. All the stills are full size and represent the quality of typical frame grabs in regular "interlaced" Normal mode. There are many more stills posted and were deinterlaced using Adobe Photoshop.

Feel free to post a link to that page on your "Stills" page- or feel free to copy them yourself and post them as you see fit. I will leave this page on my site for forum members to see and critique as to GL2 frame still quality.
(shot in "Easy" mode)

***NOTE: There was a Sony 1.7x tele lens on the GL2 to capture the action so high up the tree. It degraded still image quality slightly but the footage remained excellent.***

----------------------------------------------------
We're swampped in a snow-blizzard as I type...if it lets up I'm gonna go out and try to find the raptors for new footage- they love hunting in the snow...stay tuned.
(PS- I hate the cold!!!!)

[Noka Aldoroty]

Like everyone here, I loved your photos. Nice work.

I'm curious about the adapter you mentioned: the 1.7X sony telephoto adapter. It increases the optical zoom by 1.7x, but it degrades the images slightly? Do you know why that is?

Would the images have been even sharper had they been taken in Movie Mode?

[Steve Nunez]

Thanks-

Regardless of what is often said- anytime you put ANY type of filter- glass protector or any sort of filter in front of a lens- there will be some degree of image degradation.......just think of it this way.....if you stacked 1000 of them (whatever filter we would be referring to) on top of each other- it would be apparent that the image seen through them would not be crystal clear (if visible at all)- there would be light falloff and image degradation- if a lens or filter was 100% non-affecting- you should be able to stack 1000 together and still look through them without a problem........the big thing is that most of us will usually just put on a single filter at a time- perhaps 2 at most.....the image degradation would be neglible, but I gurantee a machine calibrated to detect image irregularities or light falloff would be ablew to detect it- but our eyes wouldn't (for high quality filters or add-on lenses)


..the Sony 1.7X tele extender is a great add-on and doesn't affect image quality much at all- I can't measure such an offset in image quality- but i'd be willing to guess perhaps a 1% to 4% change (just speculation) if that much...myself and friends cannot tell what was shot with the extender on or off- the image quality is that good! I attribute the image quality to the great flourite lens the GL2 uses as stock equippment. For $299 the Sony 1.7X tele extender should be considered by anyone feeling the need for tele-videography.

Does anyone use any other telel extender and have any remarks? I believe Century offers a 2X extender- anyone use one?

As for the images being sharper in "Movie" mode (Frame)- there's a catch 22 there.....

...interlaced video has more resolution (no 25% reduction) and does produce sharper images than Frame mode does- problem is- the images would show interlacing fields and would need a "de-interlace" filter used- Adobe Photoshop has this filter under the Filters:Video:deinterlace option- so any sharpness gained using interlaced mode would be negated once you run the PS filter.......but onscreen- interlaced video is sharper.

[Rich Stone]

Steve - I have the 2x Century Optics extender and I'm very pleased with it.

[Bill Hardy]

Great web page! Fantastic shots using only the easy mode. I agree however with manual adjustments the sky color would have been truer; as I found out just recently by simply using the sunlight icon setting it makes a considerable difference. White Balancing by using a simple piece of typing paper outdoors gives even better, truer color results. I encourage you all to experiment with all these settings in the future. I regret not using any sort of white balance settings with any shots my web page, but at least I realize now that I wasn't using the cam to its full potential.

[Steve Nunez]

Buddy,

thanks for the compliments. A custom WB under the shooting conditions will always produce better video- the problem is- when shooting birds or any animal that moves from place to place- I use a general WB setting for outdoors as they tend to move around (the animals)....one moment the hawk is sitting on a branch in dappled light- next moment it flies off to direct sunlight- so for me it's a bit hard to get the perfect WB settings- but the GL2 does a great job averaging everything out....the GL2 is a great "run and gun" camera. I had the much touted Panasonic DVX100 which is a phenomenal camera- but wasn't as "on the go" capable as the GL2....I wish I still had the DVX but it's not a good nature camera- it needed too much pre-setup- as a film camera- it's the best.