In his notes, Darwin referred to marine iguana’s with relative revulsion. “The black Lava rocks on the beach are frequented by large (2-3 ft), disgusting clumsy Lizards. They are as black as the porous rocks over which they crawl & seek their prey from the Sea. I call them ‘imps of darkness’. They assuredly well become the land they inhabit.”
The cold-blooded reptiles are the only lizard that has evolved the ability to live and forage in the sea.
On Darwin’s 1835 visit to Galapagos, it was his identification of three distinct species of mockingbird that initially led him to question the stability of species. On this trip, he comes face-to-face with a fourth species: the Hood mockingbird. This one, by far the most aggressive of an already curious species, will explore almost anything in search of the most rare commodity on the islands: fresh water. This one examines an abandoned albatross egg along with Darwin.
On Española, Darwin comes face to face with a juvenile waved albatross. These endangered birds have the largest wingspan of any bird, up to 11 feet. This one is nearing the day when it will awkwardly waddle about 200 feet from its nest to a cliff overlooking the ocean, to leap over the edge into it’s first flight.
Over the eons of time, the shifting currents of the Galapagos made immigration to the islands a difficult and rare occurrence. Today, visitors from all over the world splash ashore hourly. Visits to unpopulated islands such as Bartolomé Island, however, are strictly regulated by the national park service of Ecuador, which manages 97.5 percent of the Galapagos Archipelago.
Bartolomé Island is one of the few places left in the Galapagos where penguins can still be found, and we saw just one lonely looking penguin standing on the edge of the bay beneath Pinnacle Point.
A sea lion pup spots Darwin coming ashore, and flops over to properly welcome him to South Plaza Island, a small, crescent shaped island that is less than 500 feet wide. Today about 1,000 sea lions make the island their home.
Darwin landed on just four islands during his visit to the Galapagos aboard the HMS Beagle in 1835.
I’m back from an extraordinary holiday voyage around the Galapagos archipelago. My traveling companion on the journey was none other than Charles Darwin, who spoke to me from a shelf at Archie McPhee, expressing a keen desire to make a return trip to the islands he visited 175 years ago, to “see how things have evolved.”
We had many adventures together. During the rest of this month, I’ll be posting a new photo every day from our visit to the Enchanted Isles that rocked the world.
I’m also cutting a short film shot during the trip on my Canon 60D and lovely little Canon S95 with Ikelite underwater housing, which I’ll post later this month. Enjoy.
Did you hear that big thunderclap that split the sky over Seattle last Wednesday morning? That was our first day of shooting on my first feature-length film, a participatory doc called Beyond Naked. I like to think of that moment as the film gods yelling “Action!” Herzog has his day-one, gaffer-tape-over-the-heart routine – I’ve got my thunder. I like where this is going!
Follow our progress on the film’s website at http://www.beyondnakedfilm.com, a WordPress blog that I’ll be updating frequently with stills, clips, and much more.
Here’s a few frame grabs that will give you a taste of the gloomy vibe we’re choosing to open the film with (this is Seattle in December, after all):
I met Vincent Moon a few months ago when Northwest Film Forum brought him to Seattle for screenings of his films and a one-day workshop. I was blown away by the raw emotional power of his work, despite the fact that he breaks every rule in the filmmaking book (no narrative structure, out-of-focus subjects, made with crappy camcorders, etc.)
Moon faces the same problem faced by lots of filmmakers doing interesting (but not commercially viable) work: how to fund it. Moon has made an art of the small exchange (exchanging, for example, lodging in a foreign city for a short film about the place). But that can only take one so far. So now he’s experimenting with Kickstarter to fund the Columbia project. I’m backing it, not only because I want to see what he comes back with, but also because I’d like to understand by participating how this type of funding can work, for supporters as well as filmmakers.
When I read about the 1:1 crop mode on the soon-to-be released Panasonic GH2, my jaw about hit the floor. The possibility of turning my 50mm Nikon lens into a 500mm lens capable of shooting 1080p HD video on the GH2 by doing nothing more than flicking a switch is rather interesting. No wonder some bloggers are calling it “the best feature in a video DSLR yet.” From EOSHD.com:
1:1 crop mode is a tap directly into the sensor, it takes a 1920×1080 window from the centre of the sensor so no scaling or image processing is required. It then takes this RAW sensor data and bypasses the usual image processor completely, sending it direct & uncompressed to the encoder chip.
I mentioned this to a film industry friend of mine today, and he said “that’s cool, but your 60D can ALMOST do that already.” I was like, “oh yeah, I remember reading something about a standard-def tele setting.” But I’ll admit it: when I see SD-only when reading a manual, my eyes glaze over and I move on. I’m living in an HD world, and I expect everything around me to be living and breathing HD. So as far as I was concerned, the 640 crop mode on the 60D didn’t exist. Until today.
When I got home this evening, I decided to investigate this feature. I made this short clip with my Canon 60D, mostly to help myself understand it. It illustrates how it could come in very handy: shooting a tight close-up of something you want to frame in a window.
As this video illustrates, you would have to enlarge 1080p video to about 275 percent to get the same size as the detail captured in a window shot in 640 crop mode…and we all know what happens to any image when you try to blow any video up that much: it falls apart.
What’s more, if you apply this technique to 720p HD video, things look even better: you get from the 640 crop an image that is more than half the size of the 720p footage you might pair it with. So you could do things like side-by-side comparisons of medium and extreme close up subjects. All without leaving HD.
Of course, you could just be gobsmacked (as I suddenly am) with the fact that I can turn my 300mm lens into a 2,100mm lens, and shoot that impossibly-far-away-ship-with-heat-waves-dancing-on-it. Nevermind that it’s SD – I can shoot it. But then again…
You could just buy a GH2 and do all that and more in 1080p HD. Consider this: the GH2 is a 2x crop camera. So my 300mm Nikon lens, on the GH2 with an adapter, becomes a 600mm lens. Now hit the 1:1 crop feature, and it becomes…what? I’m not sure, actually. But I know it’s really fucking big. From what I can gather from the pre-release chatter, it’s at least as much as the 7x crop factor of the 60D. Which would transform my 300mm into a 4,200mm lens. Shooting 1080p video.
Wow. Holy crap. This really does change everything.
My favorite book about film editing is “In the Blink of an Eye,” by Walter Murch, in which he theorizes about why editing works. I stumbled on this extraordinary 2-part video (40 min each), recorded during a talk he gave in London in 2003. It’s just packed with the kind of thoughtful brilliance that only Walter Murch can deliver. Everyone one of us who aspires to editing film should be so lucky as to have this man’s voice in our heads, quietly reminding us, “your duty is to expect miracles.”