You can find and download a copy of these photos at flickr: HERE.

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If you download any (or just enjoy this website) and are feeling generous, you can click the donate button in the sidebar to the right to help maintain this website.

Steve’s picture deserves to stand alone because, after hearing about Dan Lyons from my blog a few days ago, he cut and donated his hair to Locks for Love.

Steve cut his hair for Locks of Love.

I’m really enjoying my experience with the new lens. I’ve never had a telephoto zoom so I am learning where I need to position myself (usually pretty far away) to the subject to get the shots I’m looking for. It is pretty heavy but I also have a Manfrotto monopod that I’ll use for it on any wedding jobs, etc. to take the weight off of my arms.

The flight from yesterday was incredible. My best climb was at 6:30pm! Everyone launched after about 5pm. It’s crazy how late in the day it was. I was cruising at cloud base (6,000′) towards Chattanooga for several miles before I turned back and did some aerobatics. It was enough that I could hardly lift my head up when I landed, my neck was so tired from holding my head up during the aerobatics because of the G’s I was pulling. I did wingovers all the way down from about 4,500′.

I’ve started to spin my glider, get a little more over the top on wingovers, and am really enjoying early morning speed runs very close to the treetops (watch my shadow in the video).

The video was made using my gorillapod on my keel with my Canon 7D, and another mount that I set up using a fisheye on my Canon HF100, see a picture of that mount on my other blog. I’m not too keen on fisheyes because they distort the image so much it makes trees that I’m inches away from look like they’re many feet away, so it’s hard to get a grasp on what is really happening when you watch things through a fisheye.

I will be moving soon so this may be my last hang gliding-related video for a while, hope you enjoy.

I just rotated this image from the video so you can see what it looks like if the horizon is oriented properly to my position.

To vote for this video go HERE.

I called in a favor from a local actor, Mark Murray, to help me out and we took about an hour and a half on a Sunday afternoon to film it. I already had everything storyboarded out so it wasn’t too complicated. The hard part came with the post production, which is always a struggle to make your ideas actually work. That is especially true because I was pressed for time to do the post production, because after we filmed on Sunday then I went to Colorado for a week and had just enough time to finish this before it was due Monday (I’ll blog about the CO trip soon).

Mark Murray was nice enough to put his face on a dirty sidewalk for the production of this video - Thanks Mark!

It was a great learning opportunity and gained a lot of experience with trying to motion track things and also just more experience with the Canon 7D and rolling shutter issues. Whether I place in this contest or not (grand prize is $10,000) I enjoyed the process, as I always do.

All the special effects were done using Adobe After Effects and used a combination of the built-in tracker and the Mocha tracker to track in the special effects. That was the hardest part of this whole project and I think I was mildly successful with the end result, but as I mentioned I did learn a lot. The live action effects are from Video Copilot’s Action Essentials 2 DVD and I really enjoy working with their products.

Action Essentials 2 at work on a downtown building

I did a little location scouting way before I even wrote the story board and landed on the location next to the Tivoli Theater in downtown Chattanooga. It was a nice backdrop with the Tivoli sign, and there was a large building across the street so I could blow that up (see above picture). But the key parts were to have a building with a window, so I could put in my own tv there for the news broadcast, and then also have an alleyway for the dog to come out of. Of course, I had to figure out a way to include my dogs in the film, so I thought it would add some chaotic atmosphere to have a dog running with leash dragging behind it.

Anyways, I hope you enjoy it. It was fun to make and I really appreciate Mark’s help on it too!

It’s kind of a pain to carry around this camera all the time, so a lot of what we did I couldn’t capture, but I hope you enjoy watching what we did do. What you see was mainly captured with my Canon 7D.






For anyone traveling to Chicago I would recommend doing a couple of the things we did:

• Check out Millenium Park (where ‘the bean’ is) and the Art Institute right next to it
• Head over to the Hancock Building to the top floor for a cocktail as the sun sets on the city
• See the Blue Man Group
• Go to the Wiener Circle for a late night hot dog and some verbal abuse (this place was featured in an episode of This American Life)
• Explore the city – there are random pieces of Picasso and other art throughout the city
• Take a run beside the lake
• Go visit some Frank Lloyd Wright architecture in Oak Park
• Eat a Giordanos pizza

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Inspirational

1. This is inspirational for me because it is a young director, using a Canon 7D (the camera I have) and won the best narrative at SxSW in Austin, Texas. It looks like she could have made this on a cell phone camera and it still would have been excellent, but it’s inspiring to see someone my age going after their dreams in a big way.

2. Bottled water is a dangerous hoax:

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Funny

1. College humor takes a shot at the ipad: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKAm1OmdFfU

2. Natural Selection at work:

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Film/Animation

1. RUN! It’s Catzilla!

She has a great eye for design and I am lucky to be her son.

I used the Rode VideoMic hooked up to the Zoom H4n for the audio – there will be some noise reduction to do as the HVAC system was on full humm during the interview. I also got a chance to use the Glidetrack. One thing I got burned on was the 12 minute limitation of the Canon 7D during the interview, I missed about a minute of Dr. Haskell talking. BUT, with doing the audio separate, I still captured the audio of it, even though the 7D video burned out after 12 minutes, another bonus to using separate audio with DSLRs!

Haskell and owl skeleton

Photo from Glidetrack's website, I have the longer version of this

We interviewed in the new (year old) Spencer Hall. It looks like a great place to have class and study – plenty of room and natural lighting.

Spencer Hall

I was happy with the images I got out of the 7D today, everything you see here are screen grabs from the video footage, except that picture of All Saints which is part of a timelapse. Stay tuned for the video, it should be up and viewable by the end of the month! And the other’s will follow in the next few months – Yea Sewanee’s Right!

The 'hero' shot of Haskell

Darwin's Garden - has a path that warps around it in proportion to the geological periods

Sewanee Seal

Morgan's Steep Sunset

All Saint's Chapel at sunset, this is part of a timelapse

I used my Canon 7D to film the launches at 60fps and then conformed it to 24fps to slow it down. You can do so in Cinema Tools and go to ‘Batch Conform’ and select the folder with all the video files, but make a backup first because it doesn’t keep the originals.

I also helped get Eric in the air when the sun was setting and picked up my newly delivered Glidetrack which is how I got a couple of those dolly shots at the end. I will post a video talking about my tripod and Glidetrack set up soon.

I stayed up late last night trying to comment on every new subscriber’s Youtube Channel thanking them for their subscription, and this morning put together just a few outtakes from filming this video. I hope you enjoy it!

It’s funny to see all the comments, almost 440 now, because the internet is such a funny place. Every other comment is either how funny the video is or how ‘gay’ it is, which doesn’t bother me, I actually think it’s funny! I included some of the funnier comments so far at the end of this video.

Blog Update | So yesterday was a fun day at Henson’s flying. There were about a dozen people set up and flew. Jim had a great flight and Lee soared as well, earlier on. The overcast stuff cleared off and there were a few thermals to be had out there.

I flew for about an hour and a half and got to about 5,000′. Eric W. came and sledded Henson’s for the first time so I knew he’d be willing to drive my car so I headed down the ridge in  a nice lifty line, but never hit much of anything again and landed at Dr. Dales field. By that time it was getting late in the day anyways. I had a great time and can’t wait to fly at Henson’s again soon!

So I used a couple new clips that weren’t in the original and recut a shorter version that might be more conducive to people sharing the video around to their friends. Also, most videos that go viral aren’t almost 6 minutes long like the original version of this.

So maybe this will be easier for people to get through, hope you enjoy!

Also, I noticed after last night that the view counter on the original version was stuck at 304 views as it was the night before. Apparently they’ll freeze your view counter if you get too many views right after uploading to make sure you aren’t cheating somehow and clicking over and over on your own video just to make it look popular.

This afternoon the counter would jump by like a 100 views at a time, but now it seems to be stuck again at 925 views, I think that’s a good sign that it’s stuck, which means it’s getting a bunch of views. Thanks for watching!