October 22, 2006

New VR Panos and Related News

Brian Greenstone of Pangea Software dropped me a note just a bit ago saying that he'd just finished making the first Universal Binary of his PangeaVR plug-in. I've been eagerly awaiting this since I've not been able to use it effectively on my Intel-based MacBook Pro.

PangeaVR is a panoramic VR viewer for QTVR files, but it utilizes OpenGL and the GPU in your graphics hardware to make the movement liquid-smooth compared to the native performance of QuickTime Player. Like I said, it's free and it's a quick and painless install for both PowerPC or Intel-based Macs, so go download it here.

The timing is also good because I've just completed two new VRs recently:

View with QuickTime or Fullscreen PangeaVR

I took this in our yard yesterday to capture the fall colors. Be sure to look straight up through the canopy in front of my favorite, five-trunked tree.

View with QuickTime or Fullscreen PangeaVR

This was the tent for Sweet Briar's huge celebration gala during this year's Homecoming weekend. A gallery of photos I took during the weekend festivities can be found here.

More VR's to come...

May 25, 2006

NestCam II: Thursday's Videos

If you haven't already, check out the original post regarding NestCam II (which will also link you back to NestCam I if you're totally new to this thread of discussion).

I had a little camera trouble this morning, but after removing about a million tiny screws and checking everything out in the PTZ camera, it started working again. I had it back in place at lunch today and made an addition to the rig: an umbrella.

I clamped a standard black, collapsible umbrella into place in case there are any sprinkles in the coming days. It also has the side benefit of eliminating a lot of the harsh light and shadow during the middle part of the day and keeping direct sunlight off the camera housing. Yes, the tree in the front yard looks a little odd with an umbrella stuck in it... but such are the demands of NestCam II. :) I also put the 20 pound sandbag I usually use as a boom counterweight on the base for added stability since the umbrella presents an opportunity for wind resistance.

I'll update the photos of the setup in the coming days. In the meantime, here are two videos (one from yesterday and one from today):

This was recorded this afternoon and is just a general look at the state of the nest. There is a fecal sac in the nest (first one I've seen produced outside the presence of the parents) which will be promptly dealt with when one of the parents arrives with a fuzzy black caterpillar. It gives a pretty good look at the four gaping mouths wobbling about. In the bottom right of the frame you can see the black nylon sandbag mentioned above. The video is in two formats: QuickTime 640x480 H.264 (3.6 MB) and 320x240 MPEG4 (2 MB).

I recorded this late yesterday, so the light and shadows are still pretty contrasty making it a bit darker. This shows both parents feeding the babies at once followed by one of the parents settling down on the nest for a bit. Notice the wobbling action as she settles into place. This is her positioning herself most optimally to utilize what is called the Brood Patch. Follow the link there to Journey North's excellent American Robin teaching materials. I'm providing the video in two formats: QuickTime 640x480 H.264 (4.3 MB) and 320x240 MPEG4 (2.4 MB).

More to come!
- Aaron

May 23, 2006

NestCam II: Bigger, Better and now with tastier Robins

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However, I was just sitting down at my desk a few days ago when I caught movement out of the corner of my eye just outside of my window. On closer inspection, I realized it was a mother robin settling down into a nest built in the crook of a cedar we have in front of the house. It's about 15 feet from where I sit most of the day working on my computer and I simply have to lean back a bit to watch the avian festivities.

Of course, just using my own two eyes would be oh so ungeeky and selfish. :) Any logical person knows this calls for cameras and capture cards and video encoding and Internet streaming. Granted, I did all of that with the first NestCam (yawn... that was so last week). It's time to ratchet up the quality.

First off, this is not in the attic which means I'm closer to my more modern computers that have vastly more horsepower than the steam-powered clunker I used for NestCam I. Second, I remembered we had a high resolution, remotely controlled Sony Pan/Tilt/Zoom (PTZ) camera at work that was retired some years ago off a VTel video conferencing system. This camera allows me to pan around 180 degrees horizontally as well as some number of degrees up and down, zoom in and out and do it all from a distance that won't freak out the bird. The geek factor has just jumped a few notches...

Finally, it dawned on me that my Manfrotto 3398 Convertible Boom Stand that I use to hold a 36" softbox in my studio lighting would be ideal for positioning the camera at all kinds of interesting angles to get the best view of the nest.

After waddling around in the yard for an hour with the boom, stringing some cords out the window and positioning a light on a branch... NestCam II was born. I added the light later in the afternoon since the sunlight was creating high contrast shadows across the nest and causing the camera to iris down to compensate. This causes the shadowed areas to become entirely too dark. Therefore, the purpose of the light has less to do with illuminating the scene (since the daylight is plenty bright) than with making the illumination even enough that the camera calms down a bit.

I'll definitely tweak and adjust things over the coming days, but the current image is a top-down view very close to the nest where you can see the four pink and fuzzy mouths gaping at you almost constantly.

I'm sorry I didn't get it in place a day sooner. While setting up today, I saw the mother discard blue egg shells twice which was my first indication the hatching had already happened. I had my heart set on recording the hatching process, but I'll see if I can score that bit of fun when NestCam III presents itself someday. :)

In the meantime, I've prepared a quick gallery of stills showing the setup and will link in the first video to start our journey. I'll continue recording little videos throughout the process and share any interesting news as it happens.

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This is the first recording from NestCam II. It shows the mother sitting on the nest, flying off for a bit (leaving the babies quite visible), then returning for the feeding and the ubiquitous "waste disposal". I'm providing it in two formats: QuickTime 640x480 H.264 (7.5 MB) and 320x240 MPEG4 (4 MB). People on slower connections will likely prefer the faster loading (albeit slightly lower quality) MPEG4 version.

Enjoy!
- Aaron

May 16, 2006

NestCam: My Own In-house National Geo-esque Special

A couple of weeks ago I was in the attic messing with an old server I was using to rescue a hard drive my Mom brought back from her last trip to Haiti. The drive belonged to a hospital down there that she works with frequently... but that's another story (and has a happy ending, I'm proud to add).

While I was up there, I became acutely aware of the harsh scolding I was getting from a wren hopping around in the rafters. Nothing says "beat it, interloper!" like a peeved Wren giving you the business.

Knowing this meant there was a nest, I went back downstairs for a bit only to creep back more silently so I could hear the peeping of the babies. They were taking Mom (or Dad's) clue to stay quiet during my previous visit and the parent wasn't giving away the location of the nest while I was being so crass as to invade my own attic. Following the sounds, I found a rather elaborate nest built in the corner of a sideboard with a hutch that was retired to the attic a few years ago after Elisabeth declared it a monstrosity not fit for human eyes.

In it were four little scowling baby wrens (wrenlings? wrenlets?) giving me the evil eye. Naturally, my first reaction (due to being born with raging geek genes) was to piece together the necessary webcam to broadcast this to the world.

A clamp-on light with X-10 remote control (so I could turn it on and off from downstairs), tripod, Sony DV cam and Linux-based, BT848 capture-card endowed server later... I started broadcasting my in-house, National Geographic-esque nature video from the attic. I never got around to doing a breathy, Attenborough-like voice over (actually, I didn't do audio at all)... but it did the job.

The server was fairly ancient, bordering on steam powered... but it had enough oomph to get the job done at a low resolution. I used Fedora Core 5 running VLC to encode the video into an MPEG4 stream where I could tap into it and do local recordings of segments on my Powerbook and convert them to Quicktime.

I've assembled a collection of videos here to share. The quality isn't stellar, but it's usable and the files aren't overly large.

I also learned a great deal about wrens in the process. For instance, I was just beginning to ponder how it was they kept a nest clean with four little birds and a never-ending stream of big juicy bugs being stuffed down their throats. I watched in horrified fascination as that answer presented itself one morning... twice in quick succession. Don't be eating when you watch it, but it's rather fascinating (and described pretty decently here - I set Google aflame looking for a description of what I had witnessed and found it on a site about baby Robins).

A handful of friends and family tapped into the live stream while it was running last week. My iChat was humming with discussions about nestcam (Mom declared it more interesting than Tivo... MJ made it her lunchtime entertainment several days in a row). Without further ado, here are some recordings I made showing key stages throughout the process:

Click on each picture to watch the associated video.

	This is the first recording I made with one parent arriving to feed them. They are fairly young here and you'll see the parent consuming the sac mentioned on this site.
	This clip shows both parents arriving at the same time to feed. This answered one question I had when I read that the male often does the feeding because the female is already on another nest. Apparently that wasn't the case here. The question remains whether they are raising another brood or two over the coming months (which Wrens frequently do, apparently).
	This is the infamous "housekeeping" video that answers how the nest is kept clean. It's mildly horrifying and will undoubtedly appeal to kids of all ages (eliciting squeals of horrified delight). Details on understanding what you're seeing are available here.
	Empty Nest Syndrome begins here. :) A few days into peep-watching, I noticed they were starting to hang out on the "front porch" of the nest. I figured flight was a few days away. As it turns out, flight was about two hours later and they all left the nest over a span of about seven minutes (including one taking off over my shoulder when I went up to see if the first one had fallen off the shelf or flown away). I edited this down to around two minutes, so it has some jump-cuts in it.

The little buggers spent the next 24 hours getting flight training in the attic. Three of them got lost in the stairwell and drove the cat nuts (since he could hear them peeping just on the other side of the door but couldn't actually see them). I carefully ferried each of them back up into the attic where they perched on my finger for a bit and looked around before hopping off and disappearing among boxes and furniture. The parents, of course, flew around and cursed at me the entire time... it was a thankless job. :)

They have since left and, I imagine, are winging around the yard as we speak.

Enjoy!
- Aaron

November 13, 2005

Virginia Safari Park

Elisabeth and I spent Saturday and part of Sunday in the Shenandoah Valley with an overnight at Skyland Resort. Skyland and Big Meadows are my two favorite places to visit and stay along Skyline Drive in the Shenandoah National Forest. If you've not been to either, I highly recommend them both (with my personal favorite being Big Meadows Lodge).

Another thing I can now highly recommend is Virginia Safari Park. It's located near Natural Bridge just across 81 on Route 11. Our plan was to swing through the safari park for a bit, take some pictures and then head on up the valley to Skyline drive for our overnight stay at Skyland. As it turns out, the safari park experience was so much fun that we went through it twice - a visit of about three and a half to four hours.

Basically, you pay at the gate, buy a few buckets of animal feed (looks like rabbit food) and then drive at your own pace along a few miles of winding gravel road through quintessential rural Virginia fields and woods.

Nothing about the surroundings is particuarly unlike the countryside I've grown up in around rural Virginia. What is remarkably different, though, is the constant attention you are receiving from llamas, camels, elk, ostriches, emus, zebras, pigs, bison, gazelle, deer of all kinds and numerous (and I mean numerous) other species (note: I'm going to need to research my plurals there). We didn't buy the guidebook and, despite a lifetime of watching National Geographic and Discovery Channel, I couldn't put a name to everything I saw, smelled, touched or from which I received a slobbery snuffle in the constant quest for bucketized snacks.

The whole experience is a blast. Yes, you're going to end up with rabbit food all over the inside of your car, your windows are going to get pasted in slobber (as will your hands and arms in certain cases), you're going to discover that llamas have horrid breath, that zebras like to taste the housing of your rearview mirrors and wipers, and that zebra sneezes can throw "liquid" all the way from the driver side to the passenger side and out the other window. Oh, and hold the bucket with both hands or the camel is going to just take it from you and munch on it with his head four feet over the roof of your car.

And, like I said, we did it twice. And we're also going to go back in a couple of weeks and take a friend who is visiting over Thanksgiving. That will be the last couple of days of their season, so go now or you'll have to wait until next year.

I took the batch of photos on our first run with my Sigma 24-70 f/2.8 DG EX Macro lens. I adore this lens, but it can't quite focus closely enough (or wide enough) when a zebra decides to shove his entire head into your lap or an elk decides to snuffle the side of your face. On the second trip through, I shot the first half of close animal encounters with my Sigma 8mm f/4 EX Circular Fisheye. You get that traditional 180 degree fisheye bubble effect (I mostly use this lens for doing stitched panoramas), but the results inside the close quarters of a car are unmatched in terms of field of view and, more importantly, are highly comedic. :)

The drive through the winding park is the highlight attraction, but you can park your car and stretch your legs a bit walking around in the more zoo-like section of the facility. The most fascinating part of this section (among the kangaroos, various birds, goats, etc) is the giraffe feeding station. They apparently added this attraction this year and I'm sorry we didn't get to spend more time in it. You can buy some "giraffe crackers" and then feed these docile, skittish giants at their head level. Their tongues look to be about six inches long and their eyes are about the size of billiard balls. The eyelashes give them a somewhat cartoony, feminine appearance. Next time we go back, I'm buying some crackers so I can interact with them a bit more.

All in all, it's a fun trip and one we plan on repeating. I took over 600 shots and selected about 140 to which I have applied some basic edits for color, etc. I captioned a few of them to tell more of the story.

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Enjoy!
- Aaron

August 13, 2005

Archive: Misty Moisty Morning - October 2004

One misty, moisty morning,
When cloudy was the weather

I woke up to this fascinating fog one October morning last year and the first two lines of this nursery rhyme kept going through my head as I ran around the yard with the camera.

My Mom used to read me this rhyme from a Mother Goose book when I was a child and it stands out in my mind above all others.

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I manipulated the color tone on a few of these in Photoshop because I found the affect appealing... beyond that they are more or less unmodified.

As the fog burned off, I snagged a few shots of the fall colors in the trees immediately around the house as well as some dew-laden spider webs.

This is another older set I've reformatted to put into the archives as I build up the content here on halfpress.

August 9, 2005

The Sad Passing of the Fletcher Oak

Today was a gray, rainy, humid and rather sad day at Sweet Briar College. The 200+ year old Fletcher Oak gave up the ghost this morning and toppled across the college's main road. We're all thankful that nobody happened to be walking or driving nearby at that particular moment.

I can only imagine the sound it must have made. By the looks of it, though, the massive trunk had become mostly hollow and the reason for its crash to earth is less of a mystery after seeing the relatively small root system that popped out of the wet soil.

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The tree was mostly intact but definitely showing its extreme age when I started work at SBC nine years ago. More recent years have seen extensive trimming and supports added to help keep it upright. I imagine it would have come down much sooner and a good bit more violently without these caring efforts to prolong its life. I know I'll definitely miss it. :(

Our President, Elisabeth Muhlenfeld, sent a short eulogy for the fallen oak via campus email this morning. She quoted a portion of Mary Oliver's poem entitled "Fletcher Oak" (which I will quote here without permission):

There is a tree here so beautiful it even has a name. Every morning, when it is still dark, I stand under its branches. They flow from the thick and silent trunk. One can't begin to imagine their weight. Year after year they reach, they send out smaller and smaller branches, and bunches of flat green leaves, to touch the light.

Of course, this has consequences . . .

I don't know if I will ever write another poem. I don't know if I am going to live for a long time yet, or even for a while.

But I am going to spend my life wisely. I'm going to be happy, and frivolous, and useful. Every morning, in the dark, I gather a few acorns and imagine, inside of them, the pale oak trees. In the spring when I go away, I'll take them with me . . . . And I'll dig down, I'll hide each acorn in a cool place in the black earth.

To rise like a slow and beautiful poem. To live a long time.

My photos from today are more documentary than creative as I was a bit rushed (still running around replacing gobs of equipment toasted by this weekend's lightning). If anything interesting remains in the coming days (and we actually ever see the sun again), I'd like to get some more shots.