Author: Doug

New vivid fall colors video with over 50, yes 50 clips from around the Taylors Falls, MN area where the colors are peaking this weekend.

Today was a first.  I did my first 5K run/jog this morning at the Timber Dash.  I figured what the heck since it was a Walk/Run/Jog event for a good cause.

The Timber Dash event raises money with all proceeds directly benefiting PATH Crisis Nursery serving Wright County.  It is more like a fast paced nature trail hike through Lake Maria State Park near Monticello, MN.  Lets just say I am out of shape still but this kicked my butt today and will be continuing to go to the gym to see how fast I can do it next year.

After the Timber Dash, I needed to head into Minneapolis to get some urgent video request off to a client at the FedEx office at the airport so they could have it first thing Monday morning.  I also had to do a fall colors video for someone that wanted to see what they were looking like around the metro. 

So with this being the first of October, it was a picture perfect day in Minneapolis, MN as the fall colors were coming out with temps in the 60 around Lake Harriet. 

Above is the HD News B-Roll footage I shot of people out enjoying the fall day while walking, running, or biking around Lake Harriet. Also footage of people enjoying what may be the last weekends for the Lake Harriet Rose Garden.

Time to call it a night and go and relax after beating myself up climbing the big hills in the state park trails this morning. Tomorrow morning I think is going to suck as I know my legs will be hurting.

A little late on the posting but I was up all night and into the afternoon yesterday for another 24+ hours after staying up all night to wait for the Auroras.

The cloud cover was pretty bad around Saint Cloud, MN so I drove up to an alternate location that I had been wanting to try and document the Northern Lights, which was at the south end of Lake Osakis in Osakis, MN.

I was a little on edge about shooting the Auroras over the lake since the last time I tried it the lights from the homes on the northeast part of the lake were so bright that it blew out the images.  So I attempted to document the Auroras a few miles down off of County Road 51 and 150th Street on what I thought was a dark and lonely dirt road where from 1:00 am to 3:00 am would be vacant.

Since there is always a story behind the photography, here is the story for that night.  I did have one person stop and ask what I was doing and they looked at me like I was from out of this world when I told them “Astro Photography”.  About a half hour later, I got a visit from one of the sheriff deputies that got a call from the guy that stopped before who turned out to be an off duty officer that thought what I was doing was kind of odd.  Well anyone that chases storms I guess is kind of odd but anyway the deputy was pretty cool and said he had to come check it out.  He said as soon as he saw me he figured that anyone standing out on the side of a dirt road in the dark with a tripod and camera pointed up at the stars, while wearing a reflective vest, with the parking lights on was no problem.  The photograph above was from 150th street.

As soon as the deputy and I got done talking about the space weather and the chance of auroras for the night, it seemed as if the sky started to come alive.

I stayed at this location for a few minutes taking some photographs but something was telling me that I needed to move, so I packed up everything and drove a mile to the north to check out the view from the public beach at the south end of Lake Osakis and that’s when the lights really came alive just after 2:30 in the morning.

The photograph above is from the public beach at the south end of Lake Osakis.  The photo is a timed exposure with the shutter open for several seconds so it does show some movement of the swimming buoy’s in the water.

Since the light from the parking lot at the beach was interfering a little with the shots and casting a shadow, I moved down the road until I found a spot where there was a spot that I could setup the camera without getting an empty boat dock in the shot.  

The light show lasted about an hour and one of the parting shots I was able to get was this dock.  I setup the camera low on the tripod from the edge of the road and zoomed in to get this shot of a dock with the lights over Osakis, MN.  I wanted to try and do a timed shot sitting on the dock but also did not want to have the Sheriff pay me another visit again for actually breaking the law and trespassing.

With the cooler nights and shorter daylight hour’s the fall season annual changing of the colors is happening a few weeks ahead of schedule.

In this video shot around the Ely, MN area on Sunday it shows how the colors are starting to peak with vivid Red, Orange, and Yellow leafs as the the Maple, Birch, Oaks and Aspen are all getting into their most extreme colors of the season.

OK, yes I know I have been slow to get my personal page updated but I have been on the go for the last three weeks with moving the office space out of the home, chasing the hurricanes and now the aurora video from this past weekend.

It has taken a lot out of me mentally and add in just trying to keep up with the day to day stuff life tosses at you it will wear you out.

This week I plan on getting all the still photos from Hurricane Irene up on the site along with all the video links as well as starting to chip away at the mountain of video I need to get edited and on line for stock footage.

It sounds like a lot of work but it is just a mater of organization on my part to get everything in order and then edited.  Then hope that nothing is happening weather wise that will allow me to have extra time to get the work done.

Speaking of Weather Wise, one of my Aurora photographs from this spring took third place in the 2011 Weather Wise magazine photo contest. I never enter anything into photography contests so this was a fun surprise for me to learn that I placed in the contest. 

Speaking of Auroras, yes I was chasing the Northern Lights this past weekend.  I did shoot a couple of videos of the event. 

Here is my HD Time Lapse Aurora Borealis video.

Well, it is late and I need to get some sleep before getting up early to work on more stuff in the morning to get caught up.  I hope to have a lot of updates on the personal site in the next few days.

I made it back home today from my Hurricane Irene chase in New England.  I’ll be working all day tomorrow to get all the blog video, stock video and photography.

Here is a quick photo from today of a during and after on Long Point, Groton, CT on the south side of the island along the beach.  Click on the image to see a larger copy of the image.

Off to get some much needed sleep. I will update the site with all the photos tomorrow.

While Hurricane Irene was being laughed at by people in the New York City area for being a lame rain on their weekend plans, 90 miles to the east Hurricane Irene lived up to the forecast with Hurricane force winds and storm surge.

Brian and I saw that the storm was looking more and more like a Nor-Easter and opted for the chase in the Groton Long Point area which is just north and east of Long Island.  We were still in an area for good storm surge and combined with the high tide, it was just what we were expecting.

I’ll be posting more info and a full blog when I get back home with the photography but here are the videos we uploaded to Youtube. 

Brian and I made it into Boston, MA late last night and we had no problems getting setup with a rental and supplies for the chase.  We are looking for a few things and when we went into a Walmart store, you would have thought it was Katrina Looting with how bare the shelves were.  But it was not looting, it was just all the people stocking up on dry goods and canned goods for supplies for the hurricane.

I had to take that photo with my Droid x2 since cameras and news crews are not allowed in Walmart.

Right now, the eye of Hurricane Irene is just to the south of the Outer Banks of North Carolina.  The forecast track is for the worst of Irene to pass off shore to the east of the islands and now track to the northeast and pretty much up to our location.

We are setup for today with our hotel in Warwick, RI which is 70 miles east of the center of the latest forecast track for Hurricane Irene. 

If the hurricane track shifts east like I think it will do later today, we will be in perfect position for a direct land fall impact on this area by a Cat 1 hurricane.   If the track moves further east, we still have a lot of ground to our east before the Atlantic coast along the Cape Cod area.

I will update my blog when I can over the next few days.  Time to get a few hours of sleep.

Made the call last night, Brian and I our on our way to the east coast to chase Hurricane Irene. 

I will update more when I can.  We just got (BNVN) video in from Nassau in the Bahamas of Hurricane Irene hitting there yesterday.

BNVN has multiple crews out covering Hurricane Irene from the Bahamas to New England.  We will be updating our site and our Youtube Channel http://www.youtube.com/bnvn1 as new footage comes in.

Footage shot by our crews in downtown Nassau in the Bahamas as the center of Hurricane Irene passed off shore to the east.

The video is seven minutes long and is from the heart of Nassau as the area was hit hard by Hurricane Irene. The footage shows several buildings were damaged or destroyed as the wind was whipping the island. There is footage along the coast as the waves were smashing up against the sea wall. At one point in the video a buoy broke lose and is smashing up against a sea wall in a harbor. Through the high winds, the sounds of alarms can be heard in the background.

I know I have been slacking with updating my personal blog.  With Twitter feeds, facebook fan pages and stuff for BNVN, and personal stuff, I have not had time to update this page.

So what is new with me?  Moved myself into a new office space so I can focus on work and I have been working like crazy over the last week on getting caught up with projects that are way overdue. 

Right now I’m working on getting a ton of stock footage updated and the new tropical storm system named Irene.  I’ve been up most of the night watching the radar from San Juan, PR where Tropical Storm Irene made landfall during the overnight and now the center is back over open water to the north of the island. 

Right now I’m pouring over all the forecast data and historical data from past storms to see what the possible forecast for Irene will be.  One possible forecast might be that this could end up as a fish storm and curve back out to sea.