Thursday, April 30, 2015

2 Free Stock Footage Clips Are Over the Hill

Ever since I first tried my macro lens, I knew I wanted to try getting a shot like this. I happened to notice a few ant colonies popping between up my backyard patio stones, saw the sun was hitting them perfectly, ran and got my camera and viola!

You can see the ants are busy carrying sand out of the hill, they must still be in the early building stages. The clips are from 2 separate hills. The lens crates a razor thin depth of field. From some of the shots I took, ants would turn sideways, and I couldn't get their entire body in focus. I am thankful for the FS700's "End Trigger" ability which allows me to capture the footage at 240p AFTER I've seen the action. I waited around for these buggers to hang out in the "sweet spot" for long enough that I felt like it could be a usable clip. If you look closely in the background of both clips, you can see that there is actually a lot of commotion, the focus drops off so quickly though that it is tough to focus on all of it.

I hope you enjoy these two clips. You are welcome to use them in your projects you are working on, or keep them in your clip library for future work.The only thing you cannot do is turn around and offer them AS stock footage. Have fun with them!

You can preview and download the clips by clicking "read more" below. Happy Downloading!




As always, please e-mail, like us or share this on facebook, tweet, google plus, pinterest or do whatever you can to spread the word about this site. Thanks!

These videos were shot using a Sony NEX-FS700 and the Sigma 180mm F2.8 EX APO DG HSM OS Macro with a Metabones EF to NEX Speedboster Adapter



Tuesday, April 21, 2015

2 Free Stock Footage Clips are Narcissus-tic

Spring is finally here and with it come the beautiful blooming flowers.  I have a wealth of these daffodils (narcissus) in my backyard and have always wanted to try capturing this bulb blooming through a time lapse.  I initially set up my camera outside at a group of daffodils that looked ready to open.  The intervalometer on my T2i took pictures every 25 seconds for 6 hours without the petals opening at all.  With no more sunlight, I packed up and waited until the next day.  I did take the image files and compile a short preview and what I saw was the flowers moving around so much due to outside wind that I knew I wasn't going to get a descent looking image if they were to bloom, so the next morning I took out a pot and some potting soil and moved one of bulbs inside.  I set up a makeshift studio on my tool bench with a white foam core background.  I set the camera to take a picture every 25 seconds again and left it to work.  Coming back I had noticed that the stem had slowly moved the flower closer to my light source and slightly out of frame.  The flower did not open yet, so I braced the stem just out of frame with a thick copper wire and then set the intervalometer to take a picture once every minute (hey, if it is going to take a while, might as well take a while).  A let the camera go for a day and a half and came back to a full SD card and a fully bloomed flower.  I had my fingers crossed when previewing the images and luckily it bloomed before I ran out of space. YAY!

Since the original RAW image is quite large, I was able to create two video files for you.  The close up is an real size 1:1 crop of the larger image and the wide is a scaled (resized) image to fit into the HD frame.  What is nice is these files should be timed in sync so when you lay them together on a timeline you could seamlessly cut between the two.

So not bad for my first experience with capturing growing plants.  I'll eventually like to get some grass and vegetables, but as for now, this is pretty nice.  Hope they help and hope you can use them!

You can preview and download the clips by clicking "read more" below.  Happy Downloading!




As always, please e-mail, like us or share this on facebook, tweet, google plus, pinterest or do whatever you can to spread the word about this site. Thanks!

This video was shot using a Canon EOS Rebel T2i


Sunday, April 5, 2015

1 Completely Free Stock Footage Clip Is All Flash and No Bang

Included among my party popper purchase was also some sparklers.  I wanted to sparks and clip to be sort of an obscure background with the embers being somewhat out of focus with some beautiful bokeh.  I passed a couple in front of the camera and thought that they worked out pretty well.  Hopefully the clip will be useful to illustrate a celebration or festival, or to be used as an overlay or special effect.

You can preview and download the clips by clicking "read more" below.  Happy Downloading!


free stock footage of a sparkler on camera slightly out of focus in the background with some beautiful bokeh


As always, please e-mail, like us or share this on facebook, tweet, google plus, pinterest or do whatever you can to spread the word about this site. Thanks!


These videos were shot using the Sony NEX-FS700 and a Canon EF 24-105mm f/4 L IS USM Lens


Thursday, April 2, 2015

1 Completely Free Stock Footage Clip Is Never the Same

This is probably the last remnant of the Northern Hemisphere's winter snowfall season.  This was taken very late at night, late March.  I was getting the house set up for my newly 5 year old's birthday party the next morning when I looked outside to see HUGE snowflakes falling from the sky.  An inch or so already on the ground, I thought it would be another good test for my 180mm macro lens.  Since it was so late and I knew I was going macro, I used my trusty R-300 ring light as a source.  It worked out well, since the very white snow is a natural bounce.  I panned an area of our backyard picnic table searching for a good flake since it was the same height as where the camera was on the tripod, so I could get pretty close.  The ring light hit this one icy flake in particular and the peaking on my camera (which is used to help focus) went crazy.  What a perfect snowflake!  I tried a couple of different speeds, but went with the normal real time in the end.  The depth of field is so razor thin, you really can't see how hard it is snowing, and the slow motion produced almost a still image.  At it's current speed, you can also see how fast the flakes were falling due to their enormous size and of course weight.  As with the computer screen in my last post, a lot of close up snowflake shots are now done digitally, so I though a real life one would be a good option for those of you in need of something like this.  Hope you can use it!


You can preview and download the clips by clicking "read more" below.  Happy Downloading!




As always, please e-mail, like us or share this on facebook, tweet, google plus, pinterest or do whatever you can to spread the word about this site. Thanks!


This video was shot using a Sony NEX-FS700 and the Sigma 180mm F2.8 EX APO DG HSM OS Macro with a Metabones EF to NEX Speedboster Adapter