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.

A reminder that my chosen phrase is: “The day passed much as the day before had done”

After a failed attempt to take a time-lapse video with 1 second intervals over a 12 hour period I decided to try again, making sure that i’d put a fully charged battery in the camera.

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.

Here is my driving video:

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.

A reminder that my chosen phrase is: “The day passed much as the day before had done”

So, my first attempt at time lapse photography…

My first thoughts were to set the camera up on aperture priority and let the camera sort the shutter speed out, but then I realised that I didn’t want ‘perfect’ exposures all day.  When it was dark in the morning, I wanted the video to be dark in the morning.  So I decided that manual was the best way to go, but needed some idea of where to start with settings.  I did a bit of googling on Thursday night and found this very useful article on lightstalking.com.  The article suggests a wide aperture, to try and eliminate flicker, such as f8, the article explains it better than I can!  The article also suggests a shutter speed of 1/50th or slower, this is also to reduce flicker, again, the article explains better than I can.  Setting a manual white balance is also suggested, to keep everything consistent throughout the shoot, I chose daylight.  Finally because the settings I was using were conducive to bright photographs, I set my ISO to 100.

Final google was to find out sunrise and sunset times, which were 7am and 4pm.  So I went a little either way and decided on 6am till 6pm.

Thursday night I was ready to set the timer on my camera and then realised that both of my batteries were flat.  So I had to put one on charge overnight and set my alarm for 5:45!

Friday morning, I got up, arranged my camera and set it for an immediate start, 144 exposures at 5 minute intervals.  I also set it to jpeg only.  I wasn’t going to process 144 RAW files for my first attempt!

i must admit, the view that I framed isn’t what i’m hoping got my final submission.  My 16-85mm lens on a DX sensor, just isn’t wide enough.  I’m hoping for something similar to this, that I took with a beer can camera!  But i’m going to need to get hold of a fish-eye lens.

Here is my simple setup, need to be a little lower next time to avoid the lines in the windows:

Little bit of work in iMovie this morning and here is my first attempt.   4 frames/sec.

Really pleased with it.  Bit of a shame Friday is bin day, because this takes away from the day passing much as the day before had done.  I’m also fortunate that it was a cloudy day.  I think i’m going to struggle if it’s clear.

For my next attempt i’m going to try 1 minutes exposures over the 12 hours. (720 frames!) with a fish-eye lens.

This project is to take some words from Price and Prejudice by Jane Austin and produce a series of photographs to compliment it.  The words also needed to be included in the work somehow.  Be it just in the border or something a bit more subtle.  Visual language in photography.

Over Christmas I read the book and picked out some sections sections as either possibles or because they made me laugh:

None of this really inspired me, so I decided to use the search function on my Kobo eReader to find phrases.  I tried searches for “How”, which I thought might pose a question to be explored, I picked out a couple of these,:

Again, these didn’t really inspire me.  I decided to switch it around, what photo’s would I like to take.  I always wanted to do some time lapse photography, so did searches for words like “time” and “day”.

I came across “The day passed much as the day before had done” definite winner.  After a bit of discussion with the lecturer I have decided to go with the time lapse project.  Based on a days worth of photographs put together into a video.  Our house is south facing, so the sun rises and sets across the front of the house.  I have photographed this before in one shot with a beer can solar graph which was a 3 week exposure.  There is also a lot of traffic and movement in front of the house so I feel this will all look good as time lapse photography.