The American production house wanted me to sign away my peace of mind in exchange for not being able to guarantee that I would be mentioned in the credits. Discovery Channel Canada submitted a similar release form. I refused to sign it because it did not include a credit for my footage. Today I received a new form with a ‘Special Thanks: Peter Kuttner’ clause which I duly signed and returned.
The touch screen on my new Canon developed a fault at the end of March. Today I collected a replacement from Videopro in Brisbane and can expect to be without my camera for a minimum of three weeks. Fortunately the viewfinder and filming were not affected by the fault.
An email arrived from a producer who works on a science news program called Daily Planet on Discovery Channel, Canada. He is producing a story on animals that use nets to catch their prey. He came across my videos of net-casting spiders on vimeo and wondered if he could use my footage. Trawling through my vimeo pages I found four videos devoted to three species of spiders, all filmed at night. I am inclined to give him the go-ahead provided I’m credited as the videographer. A few years ago an American production house wanted to use my footage but the agreement they asked me to sign put me off. We’ll see what transpires with this lot.
Today I uploaded the 300th image to my ‘Other Fauna’ Album. It was of a male Spiny Leaf Insect, the first I have seen, which I photographed this morning. I have filmed females on three occasions, including once in rainforest at night. Only ‘Moths’ has more images. The males grow to 11 cm long and are not as bulky as the females, which grow to 20 cm.
This afternoon I loaded a new SD (secure digital) memory card into my point and shoot at macro range PANCAM. The old card contained at least 14.7 GB out of an available 14.8 and I didn’t want to find myself photographing a subject which couldn’t be captured because the camera had run out of capacity. I first used it on 15 June 2014. Card 1 contains some video clips and I should think about 1,500 photos.
Today I posted the USBs with the 123 SD and 48 HD species videos to the NFSA. On Tuesday Steve and I put the finishing touches to the videos. Steve had to find the three missing SD videos, which he did. I discovered a taxonomic error in an old SD video which we had to re-title and render. Five HD videos were missing from Steve’s excel sheet and had to be found, which they were, and the last video required the taxonomic information to be added to the opening title. Then Steve had to copy the videos and excel sheets onto the USBs, which was done overnight so that I could collect them on Wednesday.
Steve emailed me an excel for the remaining HD videos which we will include with the SD videos. When completed, we will be able to provide the NFSA with a fully up to date collection of species videos, including four we uploaded in January. We will produce the next videos from material on a memory card from the new camera. Based on the vimeo record, I discovered that three videos were missing from Steve’s SD excel list, bringing the total to 123.
This evening Steve gave me the Excel document for the SD Species Videos we will be sending to the NFSA (National Sound & Film Archive). It is about a year ago since we sent them the HD videos. Once I get into the swing of things it should be plain sailing. There are 120 videos for which I need to provide taxonomic and descriptive information. Among them are some of my earliest videos on Vimeo uploaded six years ago.
I have long thought I arrived in Australia at the end of February thirty years ago, but couldn’t remember the date. Wanting to mark the occasion here, I ferreted around to see what I could find and came across an old UK passport which unfortunately replaced the one I arrived with, the following year.
Happily, my old metal document case yielded the key paperwork relating to my move, including the Qantas ticket for my flight from Heathrow to the Gold Coast. I landed at Sydney on February 11. I remember over-nighting at the airport hotel, scarcely believing I was actually in Australia and only a relatively short distance and a matter of hours away from folding Simon, my beloved five year old son, in my arms. He had preceded me to Australia with his mother and her partner nearly a year before.
I was forty five years old when I came to Australia, straight from London to Tamborine Mountain, where I have lived ever since; my longest ever sojourn in the same place. Australia has been extremely good to me, allowing me to live a better life than I ever could in the UK, both materially and,… Read Complete Text
This afternoon I posted a USB to Queensland Museum containing the 2016 video frames and photos to be added to my Image Library, plus supporting information on locations and species identification. There are 419 video frames. I tried to count the photos and arrived at a total of 559, making 978 images in all. However, in copying the photos to the USB there seemed to be many more items. I do not know whether that tally included the folders housing the jpgs.