Photography

Sunset & Flower Timelapses

2011-07-18T01:13:17Z

Not the best sunset to do a timelapse of, but it still has some interesting elements. I probably should have used a shorter shutter interval to smooth out the video.

This is a timelapse of some really cool flowers at my parents' house; they bloom when the sun goes down. I also should have used a faster timing interval here since the flowers actually bloom fairly quickly once they get started.

Night Sky Timelapse

2010-09-08T00:18:42Z

I wanted to try this type of timelapse video since I first built my Arduino Intervalometer. Luckily the weather was clear enough that I had a good opportunity for night photography. I set my camera to take 30 second exposures at F8 and set the intervalometer to trigger it once a minute for 2 hours.

Using the Picasa movie creator mode, I set the transition to timelapse and the frame length to 1/24 of a second. This resulted in a nice smooth video of the northern sky rotating around the north star. Note: the video looks much better in full screen HD.

Timelapse Using Arduino Intervalometer

2010-02-06T21:06:07Z

I finally got around to using my Arduino Intervalometer to make a timelapse video. With a big snowstorm coming I decided to use it to my advantage. I set my camera in Aperture Priority mode at F5 and had the intervalometer trigger it every 5 minutes for 3 hours.

In order to turn the photos into video I used Picasa, which has a great movie creation feature. The movie creator has a timelapse mode that allows you to set how fast you want the frames to last. I went with 1/8 of a second per frame since it makes the video fairly smooth while not blowing through the frames too fast. If I wanted to I could have reduced my timing interval by a third and made a video at the normal 24 frames per second for smoother video.

Custom Bokeh

2010-01-01T06:20:49Z

Some time ago I saw this project, which shows how you can make your own custom bokeh effect simply by placing a cardboard sleeve over a DSLR's lens. In the time off I had over the holidays I decided to try this technique myself. This is ridiculously simple to do and produces some pretty cool results.

All you need to create this effect is a lens with a wide enough aperature to create fairly shallow depth of field (the wider the better). I used my Canon 50mm F1.4 lens. For the sleeve I used some cardstock I had laying around, some tape, and a razor blade to cut out the tree shape.

The photos below show the difference between a picture taken with the cardboard sleeve on and off. I used a Christmas tree in the background to create the small points of light necessary for this effect. Due to the relatively low light necessary for this type of photography a tripod may also be necessary, although these photos were taken hand-held.

GIMP HDR Photos

2009-11-14T22:59:57Z

A while back I ran across this Instructable, which details how to make High Dynamic Range photos using the GIMP photo editing program.

The steps are as follows:

Open the base image as the Background for the composite image
Dark Layer
- Open the dark stock image
- Copy & paste it into a new layer in the composite image
- Rename the layer Dark
- Desaturate the original dark stock image
- Adjust the levels of the dark stock image
- Create a layer mask for the Dark layer
- Copy the desaturated dark stock image
- Paste it into the Dark layer's mask and anchor
Light Layer
- Open the light stock image
- Copy & paste it into a new layer in the composite image
- Rename the layer Light
- Desaturate the original light stock image
- Invert the colors of the desaturated light stock image
- Adjust the levels of the light stock image
- Create a layer mask for the Light layer
- Copy the desaturated & inverted light stock image
- Paste it into the Light layer's mask and anchor
Save the finished composite image

Below from left to right are the base image, the darker and lighter photo used and the HDR photo I made using this method:

This is a fun technique to play around with. Some photos, if taken properly in the right conditions, can gain a whole new dimension when they get a little HDR boost.

First Timelapse Attempt

2008-10-06T23:42:00Z

Here's my first attempt at making a timelapse video using my Analog Intervalometer. The video was made with Adobe Premiere Elements, which is much better at making timelapse videos than Picasa since the user has greater flexibility regarding the resolution and compression of the finished video.

One mistake I made, as you no doubt noticed in my time-lapse video above, was setting the camera to shutter priority mode. This resulted in considerable depth-of-field shift as the camera changed the aperture when the light dimmed from day into night, placing much of the scene out of focus.