Tuesday, 16 June 2015
I've never actually seen one before, although I think one put in a brief appearance at my sister-in-laws wedding which I saw as a shape flying away. Fortunately they are kind of hard to confuse with anything else.
After a few photos I thought I'd try a video to show you just why it's called a hummingbird hawk-moth. Unfortunately the camera was playing up (it's working fine now so I'm assuming operator error) and it kept stopping after recording just a second or so; the longest useful clip contained just 14 frames shot at 25 frames per second!Rather than showing the raw video I've cropped and processed it (a complex procedue that itself can and will fill a technical blog post at some point) to produce an animated GIF that loops around to give you an idea of how it behaves.
I saw it again, briefly, this morning in the back garden but by the time I grabbed the camera it had gone. Hopefully it will be back and I'll get some better photos and video.
I emailed too soon. I see you have sorted it yourself.
PS, it is better running at full speed. It need tracking and additional frames to run at my speed. Same as me.
You're e-mail must have been sent at almost the exact time I hit post. Your version was a great starting point as at you pointed me in the right direction as I was completely lost trying to produce the GIF to start with. It's still not perfect but given the video I started from I don't think it's too bad.
Excellent, there is another career in Hollywood beckoning. YouTube have image stabilisation, they have it for numpties but it is truly dreadful. A tip.... if you want to try to skip the skip duplcate the last and first frames and drop a 0.5s fade on. that does help but doesn't cure the problem.
That's lovely Mark. We too have had them in the garden and they always remind me of our wedding.
Wonderful. I have a lot of photographs but I've never captured a video.
Thanks everyone. If you've not seen it yet I've also blogged about how I produced the animated GIF.
Post a Comment