Here is a quick little sequence from our ramblings down along the creek this week. The sequence was shot using a Canon 7D and a newly constructed dolly that doubles as a solar panel support. Enjoy

We’ve been goofing around with time lapses on the 7D. Yesterday we tried to predict the appearance of a rainbow, and we missed it, PLUS lightning, only with the framing. On the 7D our wide lenses aren’t so wide. Live and learn!

This is a short web film produced for Montana Audubon addressing the impact oil & gas development has on sage grouse, a species recently warranted by the USFWS as worthy of protection under the Endangered Species Act. This film includes interviews with David Sibley, Dave Naugle, and Amy Cilimburg.

You can view a small version of the film here for faster loading:

This short video is just a cobbling of the dipper footage I shot yesterday on Rattlesnake Creek. Enjoy

This is a single-shot 7D clip from our latest project for the Montana Natural History Center in Missoula, Montana. We spent the day shooting kids from a local elementary school as they explored the river bottoms with MNHC staff to learn about insects, birds, and a few things microscopic. This video project should be posted in full at this site in a few weeks.

Conservation Media completed this film for Sonoran Institute. It addresses the loss of one of the West’s most valuable assets, open space, which serves as a community’s agricultural base and wildlife habitat. Contact Sonoran Institute (www.SonoranInstitute.org) to see how you can become involved.

This is a demo from our most recent project, which is ever so close to being done. The larger film is about conservation of sagebrush habitat and its sage-dependent species. Things such as oil and gas development and residential development have been displacing sage-dependent species at rates simply incompatible with the maintenance of biodiversity. Keystone species like sage grouse have been so extensively pressured that they occupy only about 50% of their original range and are at about 50% density within that occupied range.

This is a raw demo of some fire footage captured last fall in Yellowstone National Park. Leading up to this day, the fire had burned slowly through the old 1988 burn, but then it hit some unburned forest that had been denied fire for about 160 years. When it hit that, it really flared up. It’s pretty dramatic stuff, but it is cleaning out and regenerating this lodgepole pine forest.

To learn more about fire ecology, check out our award-winning film entitled Disturbance. It is well worth the watch.

Disturbance, a film about about fire ecology and fire dependent species like the black-backed woodpecker, is a joint production of Conservation Media and Paintbrush Films. It has been honored at The International Wildlife Film Festival, the American Conservation Film Festival, and the Montana CINE International Film Festival. It also won a 2009 Telly Award.

This is the latest carbon-neutral export from the edit bay at Conservation Media. It took many months to get this one out, but it has arrived! We really like this piece and hope you do too. We have another, nearly completed piece for Montana Audubon which we’ll post here in the next few weeks. To learn more about habitat conservation in the the Madison Valley and Montana, go to Montana Audubon and Sun Ranch Institute.