I went out into the Hoosier National Forest this past Sunday to shoot some video with my new Canon HV30 HD camera. I’m still in the infancy stages of learning what it can do, so I’m not real happy with my results so far. I’ll get better. Here’s some sample footage I captured last night.

I’ll post more video as I put it together.

Things I Learned:

1. Make sure to have all the equipment you need laid out before hand, in one place. I made it all the way out into the HNF, parked, and realized I had left my tripod standing in the corner at my apartment. Retrieving it killed a good 1.5 hours of my day. I also left behind the manual for my camera, making it difficult to experiment. :thumbs down:
2. If you have your camera set to manually evaluate the white balance, make sure to evaluate the dang white balance every time you move locations. I recorded about 5 minutes of blue rocks before I realized they should probably be brown.
3. Off-trail travel in late spring/summer sucks. I’ve been all over this section of the forest many times, but always in late fall/winter/early spring. What a difference just a few weeks makes! What was an open valley last month is now choked with plants, vines, and *shudder* multiflora rose.
4. Working with HD video on a Macbook’s tiny screen isn’t very fun.
5. After years of hiking around outside, finding your first ever deer tick embedded in your skin is heart-stopping. Commence the watch for symptoms of lime disease!

If only I still had all my G.I. Joe toys. This would make such an awesome play environment!

The creek narrowed here, and created an miniature rapids.

Another geode variation we found.