This is the third video essay in the series swan diaries. In this video you'll see that both male and female swans do sit on the eggs. There are some other surprises too.
No cygnets as of the evening of June 27.
Monte
swan diaries - entry 002
Here is the second entry for the Swan Diaries. No hatchlings yet, but I didn't get out to the nest yesterday so maybe there are now.
More later.
Monte
swan diaries entry 001
There is a pair of nesting Mute Swans on a pond near my home on Cape Cod. I am planning to keep a video journal of their progress. The pair has built their nest in what appears to be a risky location just a few feet away from a busy bike path on the edge of a salt pond where high tides come close to overflowing the nest. We'll see.
Monte
pieces of life
This is my first attempt at putting some of my time-lapse videos together in a short production. I've been shooting time-lapse for a few months, most of the stuff I get is pretty poor, but some of the clips are okay. The title, Pieces of Life, came from an observation I made while editing the various time-lapse images. The images in the time-lapse struck me as similar to the fragmented nature of our memories and the way different time-lapse sequences can be strung together mimics the way our brain strings together memories to give us the narrative that is our life story. Let me know what you think.
P.S.
There are a couple of regular video clips mixed in.
Monte
a rainy day with bevo
I used my iPhone on a pole to take video of my dog while walking him.
Monte
a better view of our world
This is a wonderful, and inspiring, TED talk by a brilliant young man and the work he and his colleagues at Planet.com have done to make miniature satellites that will provide daily imaging of the entire Earth. This will be an unprecedented wealth of information about planet Earth. Changes in urban landscapes, war zones, forests, oceans, ice caps, etc. will be available every day in nearly real time - amazing!
Most impressively, Will Marshall and his youthful partners have followed their idealism by making their data open and free to anybody who wants it in the hope that it will lead to solutions for many of the problems and challenges we face today and in the future.
Imagine a world in which every citizen really understands our natural world and what is happening in it. Would we cast away our ancient superstitions? Would we recognize real problems being caused by human activity and be moved to do something about them, even if it had unfavorable short-term economic implications? In short, if we were better informed would we be better citizens, or would we remain passive and indifferent?
Monte
new york city marathon, 2014 - chasing lindsay
Here it is again. My first attempt at uploading this video didn't work. The audio got screwed up in the upload process. I think this version is good.
This is my four-minute video about my daughter, Lindsay, and the New York City marathon.
Monte
als ice bucket challenge
My son nominated us for the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. With only 24 hours to respond the video was a rush job. It is intended to be tongue-in-cheek to respond to the criticisms by some that the ice bucket challenge is a superficial, middle-class phenomenon. We made our donation at the ALS website (www.alsa.org) and here is our video:
Monte
photography in my garden
Spent a few hours on a sunny day looking at my garden through my camera lens. A lot of things happen just out-of-sight of our casual, and often distracted, glances.
Monte
parlous politics
I had just finished reading about Michel de Montaigne and the 16th century French wars of religion when Mitt Romney made his comments about our rights coming from God not government. The volatile history of mixing religion and politics is centuries old - and ugly.
Monte
flower days
It's astonishing what can be seen in the everyday world when we look a little bit closer.
To really appreciate the images in this video make sure to click the "gear" icon at the bottom of the video box and select 1080 HD as the video quality. Watch the video in full screen mode.
I was playing around with my Nikon DSLR camera using a magnifying lens filter to shoot close-up video in my flower beds. Flower and insect anatomy may not sound exciting, but the images in this video reveal the sublimity of the natural world.
There are several things I now realize I could've done better, like remembering to lock the exposure to avoid the flickering effect seen in the video. Still, I think the possibilities of close-up video can be appreciated from this brief clip.
The music, which I think is wonderful, was written and performed by David Ianni, a professional pianist living in Luxembourg. David sent me the piece a few years ago when I was producing the Fitness Rocks podcast. David's music is available at iTunes.
Monte Ladner
The Safety Net
Social Security and Medicare, in spite of what Republicans are saying, have been enormously successful programs. By successful I mean they have kept most elderly Americans out of poverty. Evidently, a lot of people don’t think a developed nation with a democratic government should provide this sort of assistance.
I made this short video after taping Congressman Barney Frank at a Town Hall meeting in New Bedford, Massachusetts on November 10, 2011. At several points in the video I add my own explanatory notes regarding Social Security, Medicare and military spending. The references for these notes with links to online articles are given below:
References (click to go to online article):
Music for Social Change
I had the opportunity to work with three local musicians preparing for an upcoming Occupy Falmouth event in which they will be performing. It was great fun and they were really tolerant of me setting up cameras, lights and microphones all around them.
I have no musical talent at all so I was just in awe of how these guys, who were together for the first time, were able to play off one another and how each one was able to intuit where the others were going.
In the video you will hear them describe the history of music in protest movements and how they believe music speaks to people in a way that language can't.
Monte
Occupy Falmouth November 5, 2011
While I was shooting this video of the Occupy Falmouth protesters a man walked past me and commented that I was wasting my time talking to, in his words, these “homeless bums.” Soon after that another man approached me and called me a hippie.
I don’t understand this hostility directed at a group of citizens participating in our democracy. The Occupy Falmouth protesters are not bums, hippies or radicals. They are Americans and they are regular people – just like you.
Monte
Occupy Falmouth
I spent a few days photographing and talking to the Occupy Together protesters in my town of Falmouth, Massachusetts. I found them to be well informed and articulate in expressing their concerns about contemporary America.
The Falmouth protesters are not camping out on town property like the protesters in New York or Boston. They assemble every afternoon at 5:00 PM and hold up their signs until it's dark, then they go home. The events are peaceful and there appears to be strong support from people driving or walking past the protests. There have not been any clashes with law enforcement and no acts of violence or vandalism.
These protests are not riots. They are a wonderful example of citizens engaging in free speech on the public square, which I believe was the original intent of James Madison and the other authors of the Constitution. Our modern interpretation of free speech has morphed into bribing political leaders with millions of dollars in campaign donations. Any citizen has the power to speak up on the public square about the issues that confront society, but few citizens can afford to bribe their representatives with huge cash donations. Free speech in modern America is not free.
Perhaps our conversations about what the constitution does and does not say should begin with defining free speech. How much better would our country be if corporate executives and Wall Street bankers were limited to standing on the public square holding up signs supporting their right to screw the rest of us instead of paying politicians to do it for them?
Monte
Self-Portrait in Grayscale
Well, I did what so many failed congressmen have done: I posted a picture of myself on the internet in which I am not wearing a shirt. Hopefully, it is "tasteful." The project was inspired by a portrait assignment for a photography workshop I am taking in Boston.