Thursday, July 24, 2014

Time Lapse

I'm quite happy with the way my photography is progressing, although obviously there is still a lot of room for improvement and I must say that confidence in my creative ability is increasing with the completion of each new project.

I've always been impressed with time lapse photography and have been looking into this as I learn a little about Adobe Premier Pro, Audition, Encore and After Effects. At present I'm teaching myself the basics of these applications in order to produce some short film's in the form of documentary's but that is still a long way off.

In the meantime I'm experimenting with some home video's, some old standard and super 8 reel to reel movies as I put together some stuff for family and friends. I've just completed a project for a terminally ill friend where I have combined this person's music and singing (audio from some old cassette tapes) with some old (rather poor quality) family video footage. This turned out rather well considering the quality we had to work with.

Whilst some of these techniques are still fresh in my mind I thought I would have a crack at this time lapse photography so yesterday I set-up the 'Nero Trigger' for 10 second interval shots on the 'Sony a99' with the 18/250 kit lens mounted on the 'Oben Tripod'. It was a bright sunny day so I used ISO50,  f16 1/200 sec and fired away. I took about 170 RAW shots and processed them with 'Lightroom' and 'Premier Pro', the result was great so I thought okay lets try this with a sunset or sunrise. 

It was my youngest grandson's birthday and I got so caught up playing with him and the other grandkids that I missed the sunset opportunity but not to worry there will be far more of them than opportunities to interact with my grandkids. Instead I got up early to catch the sunrise but there was no springing out of bed this morning as yesterdays antics (footy and other physical exertions that the grandkids love) took their toll - haha!

I managed to limp to the driveway and thought, "This will do - no need to go anywhere spectacular until I've got a bit of a handle on this time lapse lark." So I setup in the driveway, in the dark and spotted the moon over my shoulder so I moved to the back yard instead. 

Now I wasn't sure just where to start as exposure was going to be the main issue so instead of trying to get fancy I thought I would start with the same hardware but instead of manual settings which would require constant tweaking I set the Sony a99 to fully automatic. I figured that by doing this I could check the metadata in 'Lightroom' to determine the most appropriate starting point in future shoots. I took about 150 shots but there wasn't much to shoot really, especially with the moon waxing crescent so I packed up and moved back to the driveway and angled south-west for another 150 shots.

I then processed the shots in 'Lightroom', exported to jpg screen resolution, imported everything to 'Premier Pro' and put together a 20 second clip with a little nature music. 


Tell me what you think :)

Till next time, take care and stay safe.

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