We have friends that invited us for a walk and lunch. We knew they had chickens and ducks, and had
recently installed a new duck pond, so we were anxious to visit and see the animals doing animal things.
During our walk, we encountered these additional friendly animals in a neighbor's yard.
Yummy Grass
After returning, we spent time at the duck pond along with its local inhabitants.
Ribbit!
The chickens were an unexpected attraction. I'd no idea how photogenic chickens could be.
Why the Face?
Here are the three ducks frolicking happily in their new pond.
Paddle Powered
Headstrong
I had to sneak in a flower photo among all these friendly animals.
I've walked around the Ashland Reservoir hundreds of times, yet I only just
learned the "correct" name and reason for the physical structure used for the
water to leave the reservoir. It is properly called a "stepped spillway".
Furthermore, because of the shape and location of the dam used to create this
particular reservoir, the designers chose to create a stepped spillway that
also turns around a gentle curve to give the water a path to flow out of the
reservoir. What I hadn't thought about - and thank you, Wikipedia, for this
observation - is the reason for the steps, as opposed to a smooth incline, aka
chute. It is to help dissipate all the "kinetic energy of the descending
water." "Failure to dissipate the water's energy can lead to scouring and
erosion at the dam's toe (base). This can cause spillway damage and undermine
the dam's stability." Quoted phrases are from these two articles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spillway and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stepped_spillway.
On a recent walk, I noticed the spillway flow to be quite loud and dramatic,
since we'd just had several days of rain. I've got one still photo, and one
video below, both taken with my cell phone, to show the power of the
descending water.
Roaring Spillway
Since I'm usually a still photographer, I had fun taking and post-processing
the video below. I used the "slow motion" mode setting on my cell phone to
take the video, then post-processed it with Blackmagic Design's excellent
DaVinci Resolve software to perform essentially two modifications: add a
"ramped" speed change during the clip, and remove a non-kid friendly word
written on the stone on the side.
Resolve (Studio version) is used to create professional movies. Go to
https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve
and watch all the really cool trailers at the top of their web site. It's a
very powerful tool to apply to my very low budget and limited resolution cell
phone video. Nevertheless I'm hopeful you get the basic idea that the amount
of water flow was impressive! And that slow motion turbulent water is kind of
fun to watch:)
Warning: geeky stuff follows...
As mentioned, part of my video post-processing challenge was "removal" of
a moving object. This involves cloning a different part of the scene over
the portion to be removed, so that it appears the object is not present.
After reviewing several YouTube instructional videos, I finally figured
out how to do this. Resolve has a tab called "Fusion" which allows the
user to design their processing steps using a map of connected nodes. Here
is the Resolve Fusion node map I created to perform the "moving object
removal" task. As you can see, this is not a simple operation. As I
understand it, there's a more automated way to remove objects from videos
in the non-free Studio version of the software, but that would take all
the fun out of it:)
