Prasarita Padottanasana
If you have visited my facebook page recently, you may have noticed that I have started adding short video sequences of some of the most commonly practiced asanas on youtube. Many of the students have asked me for video instructions on the basic asanas or sequence of asanas which can help them with their personal home practice. I have been unable to present these video sequences in the past as I could not find someone who could shoot and edit the videos. Fortunately, a few months ago, my good friend, Ami, who is an excellent videographer, very kindly agreed to help me shoot these videos. For the last few weeks we have been shooting, on the average, one short video every week and putting it up on youtube.
I highly encourage you to visit my youtube channel and subscribe to the channel. Having subscribed to the channel, I would truly appreciate your feedback on the videos that you watch. I welcome your comments and feedback and any suggestions for future video sequences. Here are some of the recent videos that you will see on youtube:
Prasarita Padottana – Wide-legged standing forward bending pose
Parshvottanasana – intense side stretch
Four simple poses for a strong core
Twisting janu shirshasana (head-to-knee) and Pashchimottanasana (seated forward bend)
Janu-shirshasana (head-to-knee pose)
In order to create proper lighting for these videos, I went ahead and bought a 2400 Watt 3-point lighting kit from Amazon. I have organized a portion of the basement in my home for these video shoots. Ami has her own high-def video camera that we started using for these videos. After some experimentation what we found was that the quality of audio comes out best when we prerecord the audio, shoot the video based on the audio, and then, while editing the video, we overlay the audio to sync up with the video. In addition to the high-def camera we also decided to try shooting with iphone’s video feature. To our pleasant surprise we found that the video quality with iphone is highly acceptable for putting the videos up on youtube. In fact, we found that the images shot with iphone seem a little brighter, despite being of lower resolution, compared to those from the high-def video camera.
I found this free, simple-to-use video editing program from Microsoft – Moviemaker – which is reasonably simple to use for basic editing needs. It took me just a couple of days of playing around to become comfortable in the use of this program. I have used this program to edit all the videos that I have shared on youtube. This program allows me to add a starting image or two to introduce the video and also an image for credits at the end with my contact information. The width of these static images can be adjusted so I can synchronize the audio properly with the video sequence.
With the weather warming up, for the video that I am presenting today, we actually went outdoors to shoot the video by the small lake in our own sub-division. As mentioned above, we shot this video using the iphone. As you go through the video, approximately half way through the video, you will notice a very interesting visitor behind me. This visitor was none other than a white goose from the lake that decided to come and be a cheerleader for the shooting. As if it knew when the video ends, just before the last frame, it decided to slowly walk away from the scene.
Enjoy this video of the Prasarita-padottanasana (Standing wide-legged forward bending pose). For detailed text instructions, please visit this blog post.
In future blog posts I plan to present videos of the other asanas that we plan to shoot in the upcoming weeks. Please let me know if you would like me to present videos of any pose (s) that you are specifically interested in. I would love to get your feedback on these videos. Please provide your comments in the comments section below.
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