RAINS CRANES & PHOTOGRAPHY PAINS
November 5th, the day Marty and Doc went back in time, I went back to north western Missouri and Loess Bluffs Nat'l Wildlife Refuge. A place that feels like you time traveled because it is so inundated with wildlife. In order to take advantage of sunset and sunrise Kim and I got up at 330 in the morning to drive the 3hrs north. We arrived at 7am and we didn't leave until sunset at 630 pm except to grab lunch. The day started with highs and lows. The high was massive amounts of birds everywhere as the southern migration is in full flow, especially for the larger species, ducks, swans and geese. (Shorebirds have all arrived south already) The low was the weather. I don't mind doing photography in the rain, I actually almost prefer a soft rain for moodier photos but this was a downpour and it was so cloudy that for the first 2 hours I didn't have the shutter speed for the photos I like to take. No problem, I took lots of video and we marveled at the wheeling flocks. I had my camera bag with all my gear, but I forgot a cleaning cloth (doh) so I had to be very careful during the rain not to point my lens up past an angle that would allow rain to hit the lens. It was also very windy. Steady 17mph winds added quite a bit of shake with that giant 600mm lens hood and of course I couldn't lose the hood because of the rain. LOL. When the rain stopped we got the closest I have been to Sand Hill Cranes. Loess bluffs is an auto loop and the animals are used to vehicles, but if you get out of your vehicle in front of them they will take off so I didn't get that low perspective that I love but that just leaves room for improvement in the future. At Loess Bluffs there is only one Levy people are allowed to walk down anyway, otherwise you have to keep to the road, and since the road is elevated, everyone's pictures there have at least a slight downwards angle. When our day completed and we were both very happy with the footage and photos we got and the diversity we saw, we headed 3 hrs. home arriving at about 10pm. This is where things turned ugly, I put my 1TB CF express card in the computer and moved all the 4K video footage to a hard-drive by filtering to MP4 file types, selecting all and dragging and dropping. My archaic dino computer needed an hour for this 100gig transfer. I went to bed. In the morning I came down to the computer and saw that the transfer was complete so I hit the delete button on the window for the card. The computer said "are you sure" and I said "of course" lol. What I didn't notice is that when the transfer completed, the window for the card data had reverted to all files and not just the mp4's. So I inadvertently deleted the entire card. 65 gig of photos. 2500 pictures. Luckily I cried about it on Facebook and some friends and fellow shutterbugs told me if I hadn't formatted the disk yet I could recover the files. I googled it and chose "Disk Drill" It cost 89 dollars for the software's Pro version and 5 hrs. later (this computer is a piece of sh**, my next purchase if I can avoid spending all my money on camera gear) I got it all back and ta-da...made this video. I hope you all enjoy it and learn from my mistakes. Please feel free to comment below, and if you would be so kind as to help me grow this channel with a like or a subscribe, or even a share on your social media, I would greatly appreciate it!
p.s. There is some shaky footage in this video but I am working on it! #canon #wildlife #birding #wildanimals #R5 #loessbluffs #missouri #wildlifephotography #photographymistakes #sandhillcranes #baldeagles #deletedmemorycard #memorycardrecovery #diskdrill