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Posts Tagged ‘YouTube’

Help a young UK wildlife photographer

Posted in Nature, Photography, wildlife, tagged , , on October 25, 2022| 10 Comments »

I enjoy watching videos on YouTube about all types of photography, especially about wildlife photography. Some of the channels feature well-established professional photographers with expensive gear who produce mind-blowing images. These photographers inspire me, but they are in such a different place on their photography journey than I am that I don’t feel a personal connection.

Increasingly I am drawn to small YouTube channels run by young wildlife photographers who are just starting out as professionals. It is hard to make a living as a photographer, but these photographers are passionate about photography and are energetically trying to turn their passion into a profession.

A while back I started following a young British wildlife photographer named Toby Wood. On his channel page he describes himself in these words, “I am a Photographer based in the UK who is passionate about turning memories tangible with photographs. On this channel you will predominantly see wildlife photography as this is where my true passion for photography began. Since turning photography into my job I also do events, portraits and business shoots to make ends meet.” Toby has an engaging personality and he takes his viewers along in many of his videos as he searches for wildlife subjects to photograph.

Over the past year, Toby has produced several hundred videos and is on the cusp of reaching a major YouTube milestone. In order to be monetized, a channel much have 1,000 subscribers and have a total of 4,000 watch hours during the past 365 days. When a channel is monetized, the content creator receives a portion of the advertising revenue for the ads shown by YouTube. Toby recently met the requirement for watch hours and currently has 963 subscribers.

Toby needs only 37 more subscribers and I wonder if I can get some of you to check out his channel at https://www.youtube.com/c/TAWoodPhotography and consider subscribing to his channel. It would mean an awful lot to this talented young photographer. Here is a copy of his request on Instagram for help in reaching this milestone.

 

I am also embedding a link here to one of Toby’s recent videos (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBdFd3iWnoI) in which he takes on a challenge to take wildlife photos using a 50mm lens. This will give you a glimpse into his style of videos and I encourage you to explore some of the other videos on his channel. You can also check out his work on his website.

Thanks in advance for any on you who are willing to jump in and help Toby reach this significant milestone.

© Michael Q. Powell. All rights reserved.

 

 

 

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Impossible shots?

Posted in Dragonflies, dragonfly, Nature, Photography, Video, wildlife, tagged , , , , , , , on September 26, 2022| 4 Comments »

I have been playing around with video again and made a little YouTube video about some of my challenges in trying to photograph dragonflies in flight. I tried to combine some video footage captured when I was out in the field (the second shot below is a still extracted from the video) with some of my still images that you may have already seen in past blog postings. I did a voiceover with the still photos that provides some information about my camera settings and techniques as well as commentary about the location where I was shooting. The first image is the thumbnail for the video, which I included to give you an indication in the Reader about the content.

I embedded the video link at the end of this posting that you can click directly if you are viewing directly from my blog. After I posted a video this way in the past, I learned that those folks who receive the blog in their e-mail are not able to see the embedded video. If that is the case for you, here is a link that you can click that will take you to the YouTube video. The video is about eight minutes long, but I think you will find it enjoyable and informative.

I shared the video directly with one of my subscribers, Jet Eliot, who commented, “I absolutely loved your video, Mike. Your enthusiasm and expertise for dragonflies comes through beautifully. I like how upbeat you are about photographing dragonflies, and encouraging. Your voice is rich, vocabulary lovely, and diction is smooth. A complete joy to watch–I’m still smiling.” Be sure to check out her wonderful blog Jet Eliot–Travel and Wildlife Adventures for her weekly essays, photos, and anecdotes on lively, interesting places and creatures that she has befriended all over the world.

YouTube_thumbnail

In the Field

© Michael Q. Powell. All rights reserved.

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Bright Butterflies

Posted in Butterflies, Insects, Nature, Photography, Summer, Video, wildlife, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on September 6, 2022| 2 Comments »

Throughout most of the summer I have seen very few large butterflies. Recently, though, I have been seeing them in greater numbers. I do not know if this is somehow linked to the blooming of the thistle plants, but I have spotted numerous butterflies in patches of this plant during recent visits to Occoquan Bay National Wildlife Refuge.

Last week I spotted this beautiful Eastern Tiger Swallowtail butterfly (Papilio glaucus) high atop a plant and I captured the first image with the sky in the background. The second image is linked to a short video I captured yesterday of a Monarch butterfly (Danaus plexippus). Most of the time I tend to associate Monarchs with milkweed, but this one sure seemed to be enjoying the thistle flower. Before long, it should begin its migration and perhaps this was part of the fueling process.

I am still experimenting with taking short videos with my iPhone and once again posted the video to YouTube. I have started a little channel on YouTube and have already posted a number of short clips, primarily of butterflies, bison, and butterflies, some of them with music tracks as accompaniment—I inserted some copyright free piano music, for example, in the Monarch video below. I have also experimented with some slightly longer compilations of clips with voiceover narration. Check out my channel Mike Powell if you are at all curious to see and hear what I have done so far.

Eastern Tiger Swallowtail

© Michael Q. Powell. All rights reserved.

 

 

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Swallowtail videos

Posted in Butterflies, Flowers, Nature, Photography, Summer, Video, wildlife, tagged , , , , , , , , on August 31, 2022| 12 Comments »

I am still learning to take videos with my iPhone 11. During my recent road trip, I convinced myself that it could be used with large subjects like bison and wild horses. I wasn’t sure, however, if it could be used effectively with the small subjects that I enjoy photographing.

Yesterday I visited Occoquan Bay National Wildlife Refuge, my favorite local wildlife photography spot, and kept my iPhone in my front pants pocket—normally I keep it in my backpack, which it is much less accessible. I was still using my Canon 7D with the Tamron 18-400mm zoom lens most of the time, but I made a conscious effort to look for subjects that I could also film with my iPhone.

I was astonished when I encountered a relatively cooperative Zebra Swallowtail butterfly (Eurytides marcellus). Normally these butterflies are extremely skittish and it is a challenge to get a photo of one, even with a long telephoto lens. How could I make a video of one when I would have to be really close to it?

The first video, which is hosted in YouTube, is a short clip I was able to capture of a Zebra Swallowtail. I added a piano track as accompaniment to enhance the experience.

The second video features an Eastern Tiger Swallowtail butterfly (Papilio glaucus) feeding on a colorful thistle plant. This video was a bit easier to capture, because the butterfly was perched much higher and was really preoccupied. I was therefore able to frame the video much better. Once again I added piano music to the video, using the copyright free music available in the YouTube Studio.

As I mentioned in a previous posting, I have chosen to embed YouTube links to the videos rather than place them directly in my blog, where they would count against the blog’s data limits. In order to have an image appear for this posting in the Reader section of WordPress, I have reprised an image of a Zebra Swallowtail that was in a May 2022 posting.

I am having fun playing with videos and think they give a slightly different perspective to my normal blog postings.  What do you think? Do you enjoy these kinds of short video clips?

Zebra Swallowtail

© Michael Q. Powell. All rights reserved.

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Playing with video for wildlife

Posted in animals, Nature, Photography, Summer, Travel, wildlife, tagged , , , , , , , on August 14, 2022| 22 Comments »

Until quite recently, I had never tried to create videos with my iPhone and still have not tried to do so with my DSLR camera. I guess that I am a little old-fashioned and think of a phone as primarily a device for making phone calls and a camera as a device for taking still photos. I am gradually changing to using my phone for texting and during my recently completed road trip, I played around with taking short videos with my iPhone. Maybe it is possible to teach an old dog new tricks.

The change was prompted in part by the fact that I had to radically change my shooting habits when visiting Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota. I camped out at the park for two nights when I was headed westward towards Seattle and another two nights on my return trip eastward to Virginia. At that park, I got used to seeing large creatures like American Bison (Bison bison) at close-range and photographing them from inside my car. Suddenly it dawned on me that videos would be an effective way of capturing some of that action. In addition to bison, I also had several encounters with wild horses that I was able to document in videos.

As you probably noticed, the first image is not a video—I inserted it so that an image would show up as a thumbnail in the “Reader” feed for those who view my postings in that way. The still photo shows a large bull moving down the recently repaved roads of the park. At that time they had not yet painted lines on the road, so I had to pay a lot of attention while driving, given that many of the roads were full of curves and and in some cases there were steep drop-offs. I do not think that the bison cared about the lack of lines—as far as I was concerned, they owned the roads and always had right-of-way.

The first video shows one of the huge male bisons that I encountered on the roads at the national park. I was safely inside of my car when I took this video, though I must confess that this bull bison looked to be almost as big as my KIA Soul and may have outweighed it.

The second and third videos show bands of wild horses that I encountered at separate locations in the park. I was particularly impressed by the beauty of these horses and it was cool to capture them in action.

I was not sure how to present videos here in WordPress, but I think it works to post them to YouTube first and then to embed a link to that posting here. In this way, the videos do not count against my data allowance on my WordPress plan.

I definitely need to improve on my skills as a videographer, but I am happy with these initial results. The sound quality is still a problem, because it was often windy and the video also includes some extraneous conversation. I may have to learn to do voiceovers for the videos or to add some music to them.

So what do you think? These little clips are definitely a change from my normal content, but I thought it would be a fun way to share some of my experiences more directly with all of you. As you probably noticed, the first image is not a video—I inserted it so that an image would show up as a thumbnail in the “Reader” feed for those who view my postings in that way.

American Bison

Here is the YouTube link for the first video.

Here is the YouTube link for the second video.

Here is the YouTube link for the final video.

© Michael Q. Powell. All rights reserved.

 

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