Avocet Video

Remember the flock of avocets that visited our neighborhood pond last weekend? Sure you do! Anyway, I finally got around to editing the video I shot and I’ve uploaded it to YouTube. You can either view it there via this link, or just click the following embed. Note that the source footage* is HD so you can embiggen it in full-screen mode if you wish.

Please excuse the poor audio quality. The wind was pretty strong (I know; that hardly ever happens in West Texas) and my camcorder has a built-in windscreen, I’ll be darned if I know how to use it. 

On the plus side, this was a good excuse to finally learn to use iMovie ’09, which I’ve been resisting for a long time. Turns out it has some great features; I was able to bump up the contrast and saturation a bit to overcome the flat light caused by the wildfire smoke in the air, and the last 20 seconds of the video feature the slow-motion capabilities of the application.

*Isn’t it interesting that we still refer to video as “footage,” even though that measurement is completely irrelevant in our digital darkroom. Ooh, there’s another one…