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Monthly Archives: March 2014

Exhibition Project – Hyperlapse 26th March 2014

March 26, 2014
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After coming away from college slightly downbeat last week i’ve come back from college really upbeat and looking forward to doing more hyperlapse photography.  This is essentially time-lapse, but the photographer moves the camera after every frame.  Usually focussing on the same point each time.

Alex, the lecturer had forwarded an email onto me which took me to this page:  Making hyper lapse video’s with a Canon EOS 5D III

I was amazed, this is just the progression I want to add an extra dimension to my time-lapse work.  As well as the video’s on the above link I found this really helpful tutorial video: http://petapixel.com/2013/09/23/hyperlapse-tutorial-creating-moving-timelapse-start-finish/

After a chat with the lecturer he suggested that I use the rest of the session time to try hyper lapse out.  He suggested the pedestrian bridge over the busy road next to st. Margarets Bus station.  This turned out to be an excellent suggestion.

Audio was also something that I discussed with the lecturer.  To try and find music that suits the tempo of the video.  It all adds to the viewers experience.  As I am planning on showing my work on a TV we thought that headphones would be a good idea, because we are likely to have music on anyway.

I set my camera up on a tripod and picked a point to focus on.  I then moved down the bride 2 railings at a time, measuring against the trailing tripod leg.  My first video was only 50 frames, just to see how I got on:

I was really pleased, ok it’s pretty jerky, but not bad for a first attempt.

 

I then decided to point the camera the other way, towards the bus station and go back across the bridge.

Here is my second attempt:

I took about 188 frames and am really pleased with the result.  I think this video is smoother, although in the tutorial the presenter mentions stabilisation.  I think this is something that iMovie can do, so I maybe need to take a look, as well as hone my shooting technique.

Really pleased with how this session went, it’s given me a lift and i’m looking forward to shooting more.

 

Exhibition Project – Outside LCFC 25th March 2014

March 25, 2014
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After being unable to actually get into the Leicester City Football Ground I had a think and realised that there is a Holiday Inn Express right next to it.  I had called the hotel last week to see if they had a spare room, overlooking the ground.  They sounded interested in my project, but could only offer me a meeting room.  Leicester City are at the top of the league and the hotel is full.  I fully appreciate that they can’t give a room to a student for a few hours instead of booking it out to a paying customer.

The meeting room was actually pretty good.  Looking at the front of the ground, with tall windows.  Kickoff was 7:30pm, so I got to the hotel at about 5pm and set it to take a shot every minute from 5:30pm.  I then left it, locked in the conference room.  I went back after the game at about 10:30pm

I’ve now put the images together, although I made a pretty basic error and left the auto-focus on, so there is a couple of times the camera re-focuses and looks like it’s zooming slightly.  I also struggled with the lighting, because the sun went down during photographing.  The light shots at the start were slightly over exposed and the later ones were too dark.  Because I had more dark than light I corrected for the dark and lost a lot of shots from the start.  It still looks pretty good though.

Exhibition Project – Wembley Stadium Car park 24th March 2014

March 24, 2014
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My wife and I have just had a weekend away after being given free tickets to see Saracens vs Harlequins at Wembley.  Which at the time of writing was the largest attendance ever to a game of club rugby union. Just in case I took my camera.

We stayed in the Quality Hotel Wembley a hotel really close to the ground which happened to overlook one of the event car parks.  It was actually my wife that suggested I should set my camera up to time-lapse it filling up with sports fans.  Without a tripod I had to make do and set it up on the windowsill on top of the upturned waste paper bin.  The only issue being that I knew i’d have to swap batteries at some point, which meant moving the camera.  There is a clear movement fairly early on, but it’s only an initial video and i’ve learned from it.  Here is a frame from what I shot.

Wembley full size

This on my 16-85 lens, with a cheap 0.45 magnification add on to make the focal length about 7mm.  There is some vignetting which is actually the plastic rim of the add on lens, but this isn’t too much of problem because it needs cropping to 16:9 ratio anyway.  I took this wide shot to get as much car park as possible.   Unfortunately it didn’t get very full and as you will see from the final video, it’s cropped right into the top right corner:

Quite pleased with it.  I like the shadows and the novelty of the cars filling up in rows.  The big lot of crowd coming out at the end is sort of the effect i’ve been after.  The sky is also pretty amazing.

Exhibition Project – Leicester let down 19th March 2014

March 19, 2014
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Had a busy week this week, contacting Leicester City Football Club and Leicester Tigers to see if I could get into their grounds on match day to take shots for time-lapse.   Plus i’ve done a couple of un-related time lapses for practice and too keep my options open.

Unfortunately I got a negative reply from the football club, saying that they couldn’t accommodate non-press photographers on match day (although they could probably arrange ground access on a non-match day) and i’ve had absolutely no response from Tigers.

Here are a couple of time-lapse video’s that i’ve shot:

Dog time-lapse:

We have two greyhounds which are very lazy and sleep all day.  So I thought it would be nice and easy to set the camera up on a tripod on the dining room table and aim it at the dog beds.  I took a shot every minute from 9am till my battery ran out at 3pm, giving me 360 shots.  I’d shot RAW to give me more control, but this creates a lot of data.  I imported them into Aperture, then used the lift and stamp adjustments tool to make edits to one frame and apply to the rest.  The edit’s included a crop to 16:9 ratio for widescreen.  The last step was to then export JPEG’s in 1920×1080 (1080i HD resolution).  After finding the limit of iMovie was 10fps I wanted to increase the frame rate to a more standard 25fps, so I did some research and found that Quicktime Pro, from Apple, did the job really well.  There is an item on the file menu called ‘Open Image Sequence..’  I just have to select the first JPEG that i’ve exported and it opens the sequence.  I can then view the video there and then or export to many file formats.  I may then look at importing these back into iMovie to add music, titles and effects.

Here is the finished sequence.  Unfortunately one of the dogs got camera shy and must have spent the day on the landing.  There are brief glimpses of it.  But the Brown dog, Penny makes an appearance eventually and swaps beds several times!

 

Moon time-lapse:

I had taken the dogs for a walk one night and noticed that the moon was very clear in the sky.  So when I got home I went out into the garden and set my camera up on a tripod with my 70-300mm lens.  Having no idea how fast the moon would move  I set my camera up to take 30 minutes of shots.  Unfortunately I misjudged it’s trajectory and it went across the top corner of my frame.  I used a similar process to get the files into a video.  Which helped greatly because I was able to crop right into the top corner and got a pretty good looking moon!

 

Orange night sky:

I’d actually set my camera up a week or so before after watching a video on star-trails.  Unfortunately there is so much light pollution around where I live that I was always struggling against the orange glow.  However I decided to process it and i’m really pleased with the result.  The stars look great and the clouds floating by look good as well.

 

So whilst I was quite pleased with them, I’ve not really set the world alight.  Further discussion with the lecturer and classmates suggested that I should try:

  • Other local football clubs (the lecturer used some press contacts to get names for local media/press liaison people to try)
  • A train station
  • Circus
  • Working Quarry
  • Exhibition stand
  • Airport
  • Mechanical installation Impact Air Systems equipment  (Where I work)
  • Demontfort Hall (turn camera on the crown rather than the stage to see it filling and emptying)
  • Racetrack, i.e. silverstone, Donnington or Rockingham.

All aimed at getting a crowd in and out.  I must admit I appreciated all of the help but was thinking there was an awful lot of organising, visits, shoots and I wasn’t sure if I was up to it.  I left college feeling a little stressed and deflated about it all.

Exhibition Project – LPPG visit and development of initial idea’s 12th March 2014

March 12, 2014
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After some discussion at the last session and during the week we arranged to visit the Leicester People’s Photographic Gallery (LPPG) which is located at the junction of Belvoir Street and Wellington Street. It is in a building that used to be the Central Lending Library.  On reflection we’d felt that the HQ Gallery was possibly a bit small for the nine of us.

Again, as I do site surveys as part of my daytime job I was asked to measure up and subsequently produce a drawing:

LPPG (PDF)

We then made our way back to college to have a lot more discussion about the exhibition.  Discussing the new proposed gallery, sponsors, group name etc.  We then each had a short chat with the lecturer about where we were with our projects.  I hadn’t done a great deal of work on it because i’d spent a lot of my free time working on my essay, which is the other final piece of work to hand in.  It was suggested that I should contact Leicester City Football Club and Leicester Tigers to see if I could get into the ground on a match day to do some time-lapse work.

 

Exhibition Project – Discussion of initial idea’s 5th March 2014

March 5, 2014
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2nd week back at college tonight and there was a lot of discussion about our final exhibition.  Talking about things like exhibition name, sponsorship and venue.

The first task was our arranged meet at HQ Gallery for a recce visit.  Because I do site measure-ups for work I was assigned the task of getting measurements for the room.  Which I will then turn into a CAD drawing.

HQ Gallery (PDF)

Back at college we then had tutorials with the lecturer to discuss our proposals.  I brought up the blog page with my initial idea’s and discussed them.  We felt that pin-hole photography might not have much to explore and might get a bit boring.  Sport photography was going to be difficult without being a press photographer.  Fashion was good, but I didn’t really have any further idea’s to push this on.  Time-lapse seems to be favourite.  I enjoyed exploring this for the Pride and Prejudice project and we felt there were a lot of options to push this forward.

Time lapse of crowds and sporting venue’s came up as a possible option.  Alex showed me this video of Hampden Park being raised 6ft in 3 months for the Commonwealth games.  Whilst this was outside of what i’d be able to achieve we discussed the idea of doing a time lapse of a sporting crowd coming into and then out of a venue.  i.e. going from empty seats to full seats.

I have enjoyed doing time lapse and feel there may be some commercial opportunities in the future.  Whilst I have been doing the course I keep noticing bits of time-lapse on the TV.  Just short little bits between scenes.  I’ve noticed it in TOWIE (The wife was watching it).  Bondi Rescue (shots of the beach filling or emptying, sun going and up down).

As well as getting involved with TV I feel this could add interesting shots to a wedding video, guests arriving, or going to and form the bar or dance floor.  Although this would probably need investment in more equipment, camera’s etc.

Another option may be for tradesmen, builders etc. to quickly show the quality of their work, how they can transform an empty space into a house.

As per one of my previous post’s I am concerned about logistics and timing.  Time lapse by it’s nature takes a long time and unless I can leave my camera in a secure location i’m going to have to sit with it for hours, if I can afford it.  I may end up doing a lot of work from my or family’s homes.