Ages and ages and yonks ago, we went on a drive up North to Georgia and South Carolina. On the way we stopped off in St Augustine and among other other things, saw Castillo de San Marcos, the oldest masonry fort in the US. They were firing a cannon, so I filmed a somewhat shaky video of it.

I procrastinated for ages in fixing up the shakiness, never bothering to fix it offline. Today Youtube came to my rescue by adding some new editing features. I used the powers of Youtube against the video and I’m pretty impressed with the results (I ain’t doing anything about the child-like glee at the end). I did notice a funky 3D-like parallax effect in areas where there was a lot of camera movement, but I think that also depended on the strength of the effect. Also, the higher the amount of shake reduction you want, the more cropping that will occur. Note that the brightness difference in the edited video below is intentional.

This youtubedoubler link shows the difference between the two videos more clearly.

Adriana and I were out with friends at Markham Park in Broward on Sunday. It’s a pretty cool park that has a model airplane field, mountain bike trails, areas for jet skiing, a shooting range, and a Jamaican guy with a van that had a fully sick subwoofer, a couch, and 420,000 miles on the odometer.

I got distracted by a very active jumping spider, which was indifferent to my efforts to try and get it to ‘sit’ still. When you only have a depth of field of several millimetres as I do with my macro lens at its closest focus point, shooting a moving object can be frustrating. Having a speedlight handy gives some extra light so you can increase the f-stop and get a much larger depth of field, so I was happy I brought my whole kit along.

No, for some reason I didn’t get a photo of the van that had nearly travelled to the moon and back. Somehow at the time a common jumping spider seemed more interesting.