Entry tags:

birds, photography, picture

Even gloomy days can have adventures...
Last weekend, it was raining... and had been raining for a long time... classic gloomy New England winter-isn't-quite-done spring weather (though the last weekend in April is pretty late in the year for this kind of thing.)

Saturday, stayed inside and hacked. Sunday, decided I'd had enough of this, it wasn't raining all that much and I should at least get out and have lunch. Did my usual trip over to Ice House Pond (got some good reflection pictures, a cloudy sky is interesting for that, but nothing exciting.) Couldn't get up the motivation to do one of the farther-away hikes, so I went over to Great Meadows instead, to see if it was less flooded. Turned out it was, and that meant I got pictures of a Blue Heron and some muskrats up close, along with a nesting goose. I think that was pretty successful, for a visit to an otherwise inaccessible park.

On the way home, I realized that there was still some light, and that it was gloomy and wet enough that the Old North Bridge, the biggest non-shopping tourist destination in Concord, would probably be empty, and that the bridge might be good for getting more wildlife pictures (I've seen ducks and turtles there before.) Sure enough, the parking lot was nearly empty and partly flooded. I waited out a brief "real" downpour, and headed in to the park. Lots of flooding, mostly geese in the river, not that many people around so I got some good angles on the bridge itself.

If you look carefully along the left edge of that picture, you'll see a person standing next to the Minuteman Statue. He saw me taking pictures, and walked over with a camcorder on a tripod, and said roughly "I'm shooting a music video - just a little thing to put up on youtube, I'm an aspiring country singer from Boston - could you take some shots of me with this?"

After pointing out that while I knew the equipment, I didn't actually have any real experience shooting video, I took the camera and did some angles, some zooming, some closeups... listening to the singing and the lyrics (mostly the word "despair" :-) he'd certainly chosen a suitable setting for it. I figured at least he'd be able to use some of the guitar-strumming closeups.


Turns out that, behold the power of modern video editing, a fair bit of it turned out to be useful (it's also up on the artists' own site.) Basically the entire section with him walking onto the bridge, up to the four-frame dancing insert (except for the little reflected-goose interlude) was my shooting.

Conclusions:

• Depressing and gloomy days can still hold adventures


• On days when only crazy people would go out - sometimes you find other interesting crazy people... :-)


• Music videos have gotten a lot easier to produce...

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