Category Archives: Photography

Hummingbird

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Ruby throated hummingbird

I found a dazed ruby throated hummingbird on the ground in front of the door to the ChemE department, and nursed it back to health.

Today on the way in the front door at work, I looked down and there was a hummingbird on the ground! I almost stepped on it. It was lying on its side and seemed dazed, so I picked it up and moved it out of the way of traffic. It was a cold morning, so I brought it into the sun to warm up. Another postdoc got some sugar water, and we fed it and had plenty of time to take some great pictures while it recuperated. We suspect that it probably flew into the window. After sitting in the sun for a few hours, it flew away. What a neat experience to hold a hummingbird!

Canon A570 IS movies

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This winter I bought a new digital camera, the Canon A570 IS. It was a great purchase. It was inexpensive, takes excellent pictures, has optical image stabilization, nice manual settings, uses AA batteries, and has very little lag between when you press the shutter button and when it actually takes the picture. It’s movie mode is also great, although it takes MJPEG videos, which are very large. I spent a very long time figuring out the best way to edit the videos and then compress them to some standard format. I chose Cinelerra as my video editor, and Microsoft MPEG4-v2 as my compression codec.

Unfortunately the movies do not load correctly into Cinelerra the way the camera saves them – the audio is messed up. I found I had to run the movies through mencoder using this command before I could open them in Cinelerra:
mencoder input.avi -ovc copy -oac pcm -o output.avi

When I was done composing my movie in Cinelerra, I export the movie using the “Quicktime for Linux” file format and choose “Uncompressed RGB” from the video setup menu and “Twos Complement” from the audio setup. The movie that gets rendered is huge, but then I compress it with ffmpeg to MPEG4 using this command. The resulting video will play in Windows Media Player. qscale sets the quantization level, and is an alternative to setting a static bitrate:
ffmpeg -i input.avi -f avi -b 2000k -qscale 5 -vcodec msmpeg4v2 -acodec mp3 -ar 48000 -ab 128k output.avi

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Back a few weeks ago I bought some slide film and busted out my old-school Nikon film SLR. Here is a nice shot of Boston that I took around sunset one evening in October from near the Mass. Ave bridge. I used a polarizing lens, and the lighting was really interesting. I was also using Kodak Ektachrome 64 slide film, which is particularly good for cool colors, such as the sky. I have some more pictures that I took on a backpacking trip that I will post sometime soon as well.

Hancock Tower, Boston

Taken with Ektachrome 64 slide film.