I’m pretty addicted already…AND I’VE ONLY JUST BEGUN!
I decided to try more time-lapse today. Well, tonight. I attached my camera onto my car. I hooked up hard power via a power inverter to both my camera and my laptop. There were also steel safety cables just in case something went wrong.
I wanted to shoot at two or three frames per second (fps) but my computer’s intervalometer only allowed me to shoot down to five fps.
I started in my drive way, turned out onto a main street and just drove. At one point, I decided to stop at a McDonalds. I wasn’t really hungry; I just thought it might look interesting in the final product. I then turned onto another main drag and eventually got onto the interstate (yes, I was going 60mph with my camera attached to the outside of my car).
When I got home, I was anxious to see what I got. I rendered it out as 30fps video (standard video) and since I was only able to shoot five fps, It was REALLY fast.
I then slowed the playback down to 20fps. It was still too fast. I didn’t want to slow it down too much more because it would start to look choppy. A humans persistence of vision is 16fps. In other words, if you saw a sequence of images played at 16fps, your brain would interpret it as fluid motion, however awkward the speed may appear.
To get it slow enough, I broke persistence of vision and set the playback to 12fps. It definitely looks a little choppy but it gives each image a little more time on the screen so you can see what’s going on…kind of.
There is definitely more to come. I might try one with people in a more populated setting sometime this week. Maybe even tomorrow. Anyone have any suggestions? I might try the comment left by Gavin on the last post — use a slow shutter speed to virtually eliminate people from an urban setting. I wish I had a really powerful battery backup or solar power source to take my gear into rural areas. I could also use a nice intervalometer that’s not built into a computer. Where’s my winning lotto ticket?
Yesterday, I decided to try time-lapse photography.
I tried to figure out the best place for my camera where I would have power and decided to aim it out my front window.
My camera was on a tripod with a hard line for power. It was tethered to my laptop via Firewire. My computer essentially became the dashboard for my camera. I set all of the settings on the computer screen.
After I was content with my capture settings, I went into the time-lapse (intervalometer) settings. This allows me to set the intervals between pictures and how long I wanted it to shoot. I set it to shoot one picture every 30 seconds for 1,200 frames. That’s ten hours of recording images.
So I let it run. I watched a lot of TV. Thank god there were movies on!
About eight hours into it, I decided that was probably long enough since this was just a test anyways.
So after 900 frames and some heavy compression, here is what I ended up with:
Now I have to go find more things to time-lapse! That is if I’m patient enough!
Kaite, my girlfriend of nearly two years, is a great photographer. This is nothing terribly new. I have been amazed with her images as a new photographer since the very beginning. She seemed to nail every exposure and have unique compositions. She took this great picture as part of an assignment for her photo 1 class. It was on one of the first rolls of film that ever passed through her camera.
Well, she has impressed me again. I pressured her into taking a photojournalism class. I have always told her that I am happy to help but I will not come up with her ideas, do any of the hands on work, or tell her when the final product is right. That has been my rule since day one.
She was really worried about her photojournalism class. When it came to doing a multimedia project, she was worried that it would be too overwhelming. I reassured her that is was just another way of telling a story.
She found an international culture and faith festival in Illinois. She went with the intent of covering it as a multimedia project.
We both went to the festival. I kept telling her to gather more audio; shoot more pictures. She got really angry with me at points but I wanted her to have more content than she needed. You can always cut but you can’t add what is not there.
After a few hours of working through Premiere Pro, she came out with a nice piece.
So again, I send a kudos to Katie. You made a nice project! I told you that audio isn’t hard!
