The video below is an experiment.
A start, a dry run, or disaster.
A start, a dry run, or disaster.
I shoot video clips from time to time, but when trying to catch birds coming to hand I haven't mainly because I am trying to catch mid-flight pictures.
While I could pull single frames from a video, the resultant still would be relatively small as I don't shoot 4K video.
My camera has a feature that allows me to click the shutter halfway down and the camera saves 25 frames, at the rate of 30 frames per second, dropping the first frames as new frames are added. When I see the bird has entered the frame, as quickly as my reaction allows, I fully depress the shutter and the last 25 frames are written to the storage card plus the next 20 frames.
This let's me catch action that I would otherwise miss due to slow reaction or the camera buffer being full while I constantly shoot hoping the bird will perform.
I have done gifs (and maybe the occasional video) using the stills from these photo sessions before, but in the video below I attempted to put together a bit better quality video. Unfortunately by the time I thought of this I had already deleted some images in the sequence so there are a few jerks and the woodpecker clips are shorter than I would like.
The chickadee clip is closer to actual timing, the downy woodpecker clips are slightly slower.