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.
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.
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)
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
Wednesday (26th February) was our first week back at college after half term. It was nice to relax and not have to worry about college work for a week or so, although I still had to go to work! We are now into our final stretch before the end of the course and have until 4th June 2014 to submit our final project, which includes an exhibition at a venue in Leicester. At the moment this is looking to be HQGallery in the city centre on 21st June 2014.
This is a totally self negotiated project, so my first task is to come up with an idea(s) or concept(s) for projects to discuss with the unit leader Alex.
I’m a little bit lost at the moment to be honest. The things I have enjoyed are:
Beer can (pinhole) photography – Although this was a bit time consuming and stressful because I never knew what i’d got until I went to college the following Wednesday to develop them I did enjoy it. I’ve had some positive feedback from fellow students and feel that these images would look really good on the wall of a gallery. Subject wise I could do landscapes or have a go at portraits. Maybe see if I can speak to Nicole about her flapper girl outfit, get some period looking images? This project could get expensive buying photographic paper and beer cans!
St Margarets Bus Station
Fashion photography – I really enjoyed this part of the course. Both the location and studio shoot. The fashion students to have other outfits that I could talk to them about. Although this is quite wide and varied. I’d need to think and tie it down to a theme to make a collection of images.
Time Lapse photography – A different skill that i’ve had a go and enjoyed. Although my final submission wasn’t a spectacular piece of work I could expand on this. Probably look at more landscapes or busy parts of the city, train station, city centre etc. Make a compilation of video’s on a 5-10 minute loop? See if I could do anything with motorised camera movement to get some of the spectacular panning/zooming shots that you can get. I’d quite like to have a go at the miniature/tilt-shift effect as well. An option for this may be work related. I work for a company called Impact Air Systems that does large mechanical installations, ranging from a day, to a month, indoors and out. A large, week long site installation might be a good subject and also a good marketing tool for the company website. I’d need to speak nicely to the MD about some time off work to setup and collect camera each day.
Sport photography – I’ve photographed Hockey, Cricket, Basketball, Ice Hockey and football either professional or amateur over the years. I really enjoy playing sports and the photography is an extension of this. I could maybe expand on this and do some sport ‘art’ i.e. unusual angles or slow shutter speeds to get blur. A strobe light could be interesting!
I think my biggest problem, along with many students is going to be shooting time. I work all week from 8:30 till 5pm. The evening’s are getting lighter, so i can maybe do something then, or work in a studio. My cricket season starts in May, so I’m going to loose my Saturday afternoons. Leaving me Sunday’s.
I am free on:
March – 8th, 9th, 15th, 16th, 22nd, 23rd, 29th, 30th
After college last week (on 5th February) I was really unsure how to integrate my words into my hand in movie. A lazy way was to just have the words at the start as a title. I wanted to do more than that. I also thought about doing an overlaid animation of a plane flying across the sky with a banner towing “The day passed much as the day before had done.” but I thought this was a bit cheesy and was going to be an awful lot of work. I did however discover the technique of overlaying a series of transparent PNG files onto my movie.
My inspiration came on Saturday night, on the way back from a gig in Birmingham (my wife was driving), at about midnight and after a few pints of Guinness I decided what I was going to do for my final hand in!
I decided to combine two days of time lapse with my phrase in-between. i.e. “The day passed…” day shoot “..much as..” day shoot “..the day before had done.” I thought that the two sets of images in the same location would highlight the day’s being similar, or “much as the day before”. The idea of going 12 hours from dark to dark was to give the impression of the day passing.
Rather than choose the viewpoint from work, which was a little more interesting I went for the view from the front of my house. Firstly I liked the fact that the sun passed from left to right in the shot (although it’s covered with clouds) and secondly, it was more convenient. I was running out of time for the hand in and rather than spend the time taking my camera into work late at night, it was easier to set it up at some.
I’d already got a days worth of shots, so needed another. I had a bit of a disaster when I set my camera up at about 1am after getting in from the aforementioned gig. I accidentally set my camera to interior lighting white balance, rather than daylight. The icons are very similar. So, as you can see, I got a horrible blue cast. To keep file size down on my memory card i’ve been shooting in low res JPEG rather than RAW, so couldn’t correct it, horrible:
So, I put a new fully charged battery in and set the the camera up again to shoot all day Tuesday.
These images were all fine. I wanted my final video to be 16:9 (widescreen). So, I used Aperture on my mac to crop one of the images to that ratio, then made use of the “lift adjustments” and “stamp adjustments” feature so that it automatically cropped all of the images (144 per day) to the same size.
I then used Aperture to export the images to 1280×720 for HD 720p resolution. This being the highest resolution that iMovie would let me export.
These images were then dragged into iMovie. I put 0.2 seconds between the shots. Then added some black stills with different timings to overlay the animated words (built into iMovie). I chose a style of word transition where the words were on two stacked lines, they fly into the centre of the screen from opposite sides pause together and then carry on to the opposite side of the screen. Again, ‘passing’.
A final choice was some music. I felt something upbeat would add to the whole experience and the beats might coincide with the almost jerky nature of the video. I opened up iTunes and searched my library for the word “Day” I dismissed the dance tracks because the words didn’t mean a lot. Some slow songs came up, but as I mentioned early I wanted upbeat. Then I found a punk version of “Happy Days” (from the 70-80’sTV program) which seemed to fit the bill. It’s upbeat and mentions all the days of the week as if they just keep passing by and it happened to be just the right length to suit my video!
Here is my final video:
Conclusion
I really enjoyed doing something a bit different. When I got my camera a few years ago i’d seen in the manual that I could do time lapse but had never got round to doing anything with it. I wasn’t feeling particularly inspired by the text in Pride and Prejudice and was struggling with the concept of several images, we’ve generally been asked to visually describe a word or phase within one photograph. So by using the search function on my ebook reader looking for “day” and “time” I turned it around to do something that I wanted to do. I would be interested to see how far I could take this, although i’m not sure how i’d exhibit it? I’d possibly have to get a TV into the gallery or QR code links to youtube video’s of my work? Although this would mean people looking at my work on small tablet and phone screens.
By way of improvements i’d like to photograph shorter events with more frames, so the video’s look smoother. I’d possibly also need to look at different video editing software as the shortest frame rate I can do with iMovie is 10fps and from what i’ve read, 24fps is what I should aim for. The music was also a bit of a last minute choice, i’m fairly pleased with it, but probably should have thought about it sooner.
On the back of a comment by my wife along the lines of liking the sky and clouds in my lime-lapse stuff I decided to try something from home, looking out the back window, focussing on a tree for some interest and having a lot of sky behind it.
I know definitely know what I cannot shoot a full day on 1 minute intervals. Checking the time stamp on the shots it lasted till midday, then went flat. Again, it’s a shame, the video looks really smooth:
A reminder that my chosen phrase is: “The day passed much as the day before had done”
I’m going for the almost mundane passing of day to day life to my sequences.
I’ve liked the couple of video’s that I’ve done, but have wanted them to be a bit smoother. So I made a late night visit to our offices to setup my camera to take a shot every minute between 6am and 6pm (720 shots). I made sure i’d got plenty of space on the memory card and was shooting at a low resolution (HD widescreen is about 1600×900, so I only just need more than that). I even turned the auto preview off to try and conserve battery power.
Unfortunately, when I collected my camera this morning it hadn’t lasted must past 11am. I thought id put a fully charged battery in. Anyway, it’s a real shame because I think it works well:
As a reminder the phrase that I have chosen is “The day passed much as the day before had done”. So i’ve been looking for ways to go from sunrise to sunset.
The manufacturing part of the company that I work for is called Impact Ducting Sales. They currently have a two storey office on Oakland Road, but the top floor is vacant. I decided that their yard might make a good subject for a time lapse project. So I borrowed a key form the MD and went in on Sunday night to set a time lapse running at midnight till midnight on Monday 27th. So photographs taken every 5 minutes over 24 hours. I used similar settings to my first attempt, 100ISO, f8, 1/50, Manual focus, but forgot to set manual white balance and I think it shows. As before I dragged the photo’s into iMovie and made a fast slideshow (0.1 sec per picture, so 10fps playback, I think this is as fast as iMovie goes). I actually only used photo’s from 7am till 5pm as everything outside that was pretty much pitch black.
Here is my video:
I picked up my camera and tripod from work today. Tuesday is badminton night, so I drive from Leicester to Hinckley and back. So that my camera wasn’t bouncing about in the boot I sat it on the passenger side seat next to me. Which gave me an idea! I remembered those sped up/time lapse car journeys. So before leaving Hinckley I wedged my tripod into the passenger side footwell to point out of the windscreen. I knew the battery might be struggling, so I just set the camera to take a shot every 2 seconds, until it went flat. I got 184 frames. I dragged these into iMovie and did the same. It sort of works, a bit jerky and it’s a shame it was raining. I’d like to try again, but take shots every second or quicker.
After going to work this evening and setting my camera up to take a sequence of the works yard from midnight till midnight on Monday i’ve decided to have a look on youtube for inspiration for other sequences to try. Although i’ve got a horrible feeling I left it on Automatic white balance…
I found a useful tutorial video, which seemed to suggest that shutter speed didn’t matter too much and that I need to be looking at 24fps (movie standard) playback. So I might try a really short interval later in the week, say 10 seconds. I’ll see how Monday’s goes.
Tutorial video:
I also found this video, which has some brilliant sequences. The panning and zooming (done using a motorised slider) ones look amazing:
I also found a set of video’s that were really helpful. Lots of great information about length of video, time between frames, what to shoot and framing. Again, they don’t seem too fussed about aperature. They are keen on keeping the shutter speed around 1/50th. But did suggest this could change if I was shooting a very bright or dark sequence. RAW seemed a favourite as well, rather than easy to use JPEG’s.
Starmead Photography 