For those of you who didn't realize, I have been in North Carolina for the past month. This past weekend I decided to check out a local state park. They have a few hiking trails with some points that overlook a lake. It was nice to get out and about and brought me back to some of my elementary school days when they would take us out hiking through the forest behind our school.

I took a number of still photographs, but also some video. I thought I'd try out putting together a short montage of some of the scenes. Videography is still pretty new to me, and it's different enough from still photography that the technical aspects require some new techniques. For example, shutter speed in video becomes fairly important. Most people seem to recommend shooting at a shutter speed that is twice your framerate. So for example, I shot these clips all at 1/60s shutter speed. Which, if you can imagine, on a super sunny day would result in massive over exposure. Stopping down the aperture seems like a good choice until you realize that you're reaching f-stops of like 11 or 22, which means you are reaching the diffraction limit.

And that's where a neutral density filter would come into play. For me, I don't have one... so as an alternative I threw on my circular polarizer, which helped to cut out a one or two stops of light. I still had to stop my aperture down more than I would have liked though... but it helped a bit.

It's an interesting medium.

Hmm. I'm not yet sure whether YouTube or Vimeo is better for a free account when embedding. Vimeo offers generally higher quality, but with a free account (as I have), embedding the video gives a lower quality video. Viewing on Vimeo's website lets you watch it in "HD"!