Sunday, August 2, 2015

A blue moon rises

Friday night, I saw a magnificent moonrise.  I went looking for it and found a spot to watch on a hill behind the Valley Grove Church—the place where Thorstein Veblen's parents were buried.  According to the charts, the sunset and moonrise were supposed to happen the same minute.  In practice there were a few minutes between the events.

The land surrounding the church has been planted with authentic prairie grasses.  The lovely specimen that opens the video is giant bluestem.  This grass can reach a height of over six feet (183 cm) and the root system can go down twelve (366 cm).  The great midwest prairies were formed by such plants.  Much of the food in North America grows in the organic matter left behind by these giants.

Anyway, this little movie fulfilled two functions.  It got me back into video editing and reminded me that my project left from February is not done yet.  So this August, if my posts are not especially regular, its because I am going to try to get those promised videos done before Labor Day.

Enjoy.  Note that a bat came out to show off in the last video clip.  Full moon, an old graveyard, and bats.  Doesn't get much better than that.

2 comments:

  1. Wonderful, beautiful...quiet and "elegant!" Thank you.

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    Replies
    1. You are welcome. I look at the new video cameras these days and lust. My current camera is from 2008 which makes it ancient as these things go. So the exercise these days is to see what light can be captured under difficult conditions with "old" technology.

      I was especially happy with the way the pictures turned out—an improvement that was not a function of the camera but of the editing process. For years, I have been disappointed with how Youtube degraded my video footage in the upload process. Turns out if you do it right, Youtube accepts your coding and doesn't transcode your offering at all. No waiting in the transcoding queue either. If you select the 1080p Youtube setting, it really looks exactly like the version I created for uploading purposes. This has made me very happy because aside from my former video-quality complaints, I really like being on Youtube.

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