New video: Monkey See!

 Posted by at 2:53 pm on May 30, 2012
May 302012
 

Everything you need to know about our latest video can be summed up in one word: monkeys. Monkeys everywhere.

Actually, there’s a lot more to it than that. About a year ago, Nate and I learned about some really cool genetics research involving squirrel monkeys. And luckily for us, Nate was teaching a summer science program for middle school students at a place called Monkey Jungle in south Florida, which has a colony of captive squirrel monkeys. When I was in Florida last summer for my anole research, we had the amazing opportunity to film at Monkey Jungle for a couple of mornings. It was really fun to interact with the monkeys! I won’t say they didn’t make shooting a challenge, because they can be pretty mischievous little critters. But they sure made it more interesting.

With all of our other projects, it’s taken almost a year to turn this footage into a finished video! But we like the result. If you want to learn some very cool science, or even if you just want to see Nate serve as a playground for monkeys, check it out!

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New Video: Backyard Naturalists!

 Posted by at 9:05 am on May 24, 2012
May 242012
 

Well, it’s been a crazy few months – Nate finished his dissertation and got his Ph.D. from the University of Miami earlier this month, and I’m just a couple of weeks away from getting my Ph.D. from UCLA. We successfully funded our upcoming book, The Symbol: Wall Lizards of the Pityusic Archipelago through Kickstarter, and we’re less than a month away from our 1-month trip to Ibiza and Formentera to capture photos for the book!

With all of this stuff going on, we haven’t been producing as much new video content as we would like. But when our friend Clay Bolt asked us if we’d like to produce a short video for his new organization, , we had to make room in our busy schedules for it! Clay has already gathered some serious photographic talent all over the world to participate in , a photographic endeavor in which photographers capture everyday organisms in their area on a simple white background (you can see a few of my own Meet Your Neighbours images, captured around LA, here). These distinctive images grab your attention and focus your eyes on the intricate – and often beautiful – details of even the most seemingly mundane creatures.

Backyard Naturalists takes a similar approach, focusing on local wildlife (including traditionally “uncharismatic” organisms like arthropods and plants) to connect kids with nature. Backyard Naturalists workshops use photography (including the Meet Your Neighbours technique) and other activities to get kids excited about the nature that’s all around them. To introduce Backyard Naturalists to the world, we wanted to show kids (and their parents) that anyone can be a naturalist. And we wanted to portray the amazing diversity of wildlife that you can find near your home, wherever you may live. See what you think!

As usual, our talented friend Dan Warren, an evolutionary biologist at UT Austin, composed and performed the music that you’ll hear in the film.

Of course, Nate and I had a great time shooting this film. We don’t get a lot of opportunities to work together in person, since we live on opposite sides of the country! Here are a few photos we took while we were working on this video.

A young Anhinga dries its wings in the last rays of sunlight. Everglades National Park.

Looking northeast from the Everglades, Miami's city lights give the night sky an orange glow.

Nate affixes a GoPro point-of-view camera to the underside of his skateboard.

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Watching the Earth turn through your camera

 Posted by at 8:00 am on May 7, 2012
May 072012
 

On Saturday, I couldn’t help but go outside and watch the “supermoon” for a while. For those who don’t know, supermoon has become the fashionable term to refer to a full moon that coincides with the closest approach the moon makes to Earth in its orbit (also called the moon’s perigee). Saturday’s supermoon was about 30 percent brighter than the average full moon, and as I stood outside my apartment building at around 10pm, the light from the moon seemed to overwhelm the LA streetlights.

I figured this would be a good opportunity to get some images of the moon’s disk, so I brought out my camera and my biggest telephoto lens, a 500mm. As many photographers know, you can use a modern SLR’s “live view” function to help you manually focus on small or distant objects; by magnifying the sensor’s image, on the camera’s LCD screen, you can see minute details and focus more precisely than you can by looking through the viewfinder.

As it turns out, this is a pretty cool way to see some amazing details on the Moon, too! With a decent telephoto lens and magnified Live View, your camera isn’t half-bad as a telescope. My wife Liz was looking at the highly-magnified moon image on my camera’s LCD screen, and she asked “why does it keep moving?” I wasn’t sure what she meant at first; it’s hard to keep the camera steady at extreme magnification levels, but the motion Liz noticed was smooth and consistent. We both realized at the same time what we were seeing: the moon’s apparent motion across the night sky! We were seeing the Moon with so much magnification that we could actually watch it “move” as the Earth rotated beneath it! Pretty darn cool, if you ask me!

Here’s how you can observe this effect yourself:

  1. Attach your camera and your longest telephoto lens (mine was a 500mm + 1.4x teleconverter, but a shorter combination should also work) to a sturdy tripod.
  2. Aim at the moon, focus through the viewfinder, and lock down the tripod.
  3. Switch to Manual exposure mode to maximize your control over the Live View image. If your camera allows “exposure simulation” in Live View mode, that’s the option you want.
  4. Activate Live View and adjust your aperture and shutter speed settings to get an image of the moon on your screen that’s not overexposed.
  5. Zoom in as far as you can on the Live View image. Fine-tune your focus on the moon.
  6. If your lens has Image Stabilization / Vibration Reduction, turn it OFF. By attempting to correct for random camera movement, your lens’s IS will obscure the subtle movement of the moon.
  7. Enjoy watching the moon move across your LCD screen!

Let us know if you try this for yourself. How did it work? (You don’t need a supermoon to make this work — try it out on any moon, any phase, super- or not-so-super!)