Conservation Media’s photo, entitled Sage-grouse in Gas Country is one of thirty jury-selected photos for the 2012 Environmental Photography Exhibit at the American Mountaineering Museum February 24th.

Conservation Media is pleased to announce that our film Peak to Peak is an Official Selection at the 2011 American Conservation Film Festival!

Our film will screen at 7:15p on Saturday, November 5th in the Byrd Auditorium at the National Conservation Training Center in Sepherdstown, WV.

Peak to Peak is the second film we’ve had chosen for this festival, with Disturbance being our first submission and an Official Selection in 2009.  Peak to Peak has been well received where ever it has screened, and there is still the possibility it could receive the Audience Choice Award.  Better yet, tell us what YOU think of our film.

Building a home in a riparian area may be a dream come true for some, but we lose more than important bird habitat. You may just lose your home.

This film was produced by Conservation Media for Montana Audubon through a grant from TogetherGreen, an initiative of National Audubon and Toyota.

Here is a short clip giving you a taste of what to expect from our large NRCS Sage Grouse Initiative campaign.

http://www.vimeo.com/22503582

We will be producing many short videos from 5 western states over the next few months, so keep checking back. Better yet, subscribe to the RSS feed, and the new videos will come to you!

Conservation Media is pleased to announce that we have picked up two, count ‘em, two Merit Awards from the 34th Annual International Wildlife Film Festival in Missoula, AND two Finalist Designations! There may be more Official Selections to come!

Our film Crossroads, embedded below, picked up a Merit Award for Conservation Message and a Merit Award for Made in Montana film, the home of the long-running, prestigious film festival.

More to come!

Here is a quick sample from an outing last week.

Under the VIDEO tab, you can see our completed, award-winning films.

While watching this fun little film full of running, bouncing, and tumbling bighorn lambs, you can also learn how climate change may impact bighorn sheep and other larger herbivores. Produced for the Montana Conservation Science Institute.

On December 13th, 2010, the US Fish & Wildlife Service published a long-awaited report on the potential listing of the wolverine (Gulo gulo) under the Endangered Species Act.

Rare by nature, the 30lb (14kg) wolverine has achieved mythical status for its ability to kill moose hindered by deep snow and to drive wolves and grizzly bears from their kills. Scavenging and hunting, wolverines roam the high country where they depend on deep snowpack for denning. In fact, persistence of snowpack into late April is the greatest predictor of their occurrence, something that is measurably shifting due to climate change.

The USFWS report finds that protection under the Endangered Species Act is indeed warranted for the wolverine, but so great is the backlog of imperiled species, and so poor is the funding that protection for the wolverine must be deferred until the USFWS can deal properly with other priority species.

Although the report simultaneously acknowledges the imperiled status of the species and denies it protection, the report is at least significant in that it acknowledges that climate change impacts to habitat and connectivity are serious and reason to give rare and declining species like the wolverine federal protection.

Here is a recent HDR (High Dynamic Range) time lapse from our edit bay. To date, digital cameras still have problems simultaneously resolving details in bright and dark areas, and one solution for photography is to bracket the exposure of a composition and then merge the images with various software. It is not currently feasible to do this with video, but since time lapses are video created from stills, we can create HDR video.

To the left you can see examples of the three bracketed exposures, rendered into their own time lapses. To the right is the digitally merged version. The result is a time lapse with details in the dark areas (sagebrush) and details in the highlights (snow,clouds).

We could have made the entire piece lighter overall, but we chose simply to subtly bring out the details in the sagebrush and cottonwoods, while capping the IRE peaks.

This process is very time consuming, but the results are well worth it.

We’ll post more here later, so check back.

Produced by Conservation Media for The Wolverine Foundation, this short film explores one of the most fascinating and least understood animals on the planet. This small, rare, and elusive creature may be able to kill a moose or fend a grizzly off a kill, but it faces serious threats such as climate change for which it is no match.

You can support scientific research by supporting The Wolverine Foundation. Go to www.WolverineFoundation.org to see how you can help.