Can Monkeys Fly?

©2014 grEGORy simpson

ABOUT THESE PHOTOS:

If you’re wondering why this video contains a greater percentage of accurately exposed and sharply focused pictures than are normally found on ULTRAsomething, I have a perfectly good explanation: many of these photos are quite old! Granted, this is an excuse normally reserved for posting shots of lesser fidelity, not greater. But this site has always been rather contrarian in nature. I used old photos simply because I thought it would be fun to comb through a decade-old corner of my Lightroom library to see what I might find. And more often than not, what I found was embarrassing evidence that I once believed “accurately exposed” and “sharply focused” were synonyms for “good photograph.” Silly me. So in order to save myself the humiliation of having too many “proper” photos in the video, I decided to mix in a few recent shots of “dubious” quality, which are obviously more to my current liking.

For those who care about such things, here are the shot specs for each photo frame, in order, from the beginning of the video:

Frame 1: Ugly Bird – Canon EOS 20D + 135mm f/2L USM lens
Frame 2: Migratory Flock – Canon EOS 40D + 17-40mm f/4L USM lens
Frame 3: Nature Studies – Canon EOS 5D + 135mm f/2L USM lens
Frame 4: Inverted Bird – Canon EOS 20D + 135mm f/2L USM lens
Frame 5: Thirsty Bird – Leica M6TTL + 21mm f/2.8 Elmarit, Tri-X at ISO 400, Ilfotec DD-X
Frame 6: Crows on a Rail – Olympus OM-D E-M1 + Olympus 60mm f/2.8 Macro lens
Frame 7: Gull on a Waterfall – Leica M6TTL + 35mm f/2 Summicron-M (v4), FP4+ at ISO 250, Diafine
Frame 8: Pigeon on a Rail – Olympus Pen EE-2, Kentmere 100 at ISO 50, Rodinal 1:50
Frame 9: Urban Birds – Ricoh GR
Frame 10: Two Geese – Panasonic DMC-G1 (lens unknown)
Frame 11: Flying Monkey – Canon EOS 20D + 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6 DO IS USM lens
Frame 12: Tweeter – Canon EOS 40D + 17-40mm f/4L USM lens

For the even fewer of you who care about the audio/multimedia side of this presentation, I will mention that (as always), I composed the score specifically for this video. The recording was done in Ableton Live using a handful of software instruments (U-He Bazille, Native Instruments Absynth, FM8 and Monark) along with some software effects (Izotope Stutter Edit, Native Instruments Solid EQ and Solid Bus Comp, plus an assortment of processing plugins from Sound Toys.) The bulk of the sound was generated from multi tracking two different, but interconnected hardware synthesizers: a Dave Smith Instruments Pro 2 and a chaotic mess of knobs, wires, switches, circuit boards and jacks, which make up the modular synthesizer that I affectionally refer to as “the wee wiggler.” Video editing was performed in Final Cut Pro X.

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