Exhibition Project – Leicester let down 19th March 2014

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.