Time Lapse Photography

Time Lapse Photography

So my newest project has been to try out time-lapse photography, something that actually isn’t very expensive to accomplish but great fun to produce (although the actual time lapse can get rather boring as once you have set up your camera, it’s just click and go for about 15-20 minutes depending on how long you want your final product to look like?
So my initial research showed me that pretty essential, but not completely necessary) are of course your DSLR, and a wide angle lens, and most important a tripod!
The next thing I had to look at was what they call frame rate, now this to help you decide how “jolty” or “smooth” you want your final time lapse to be.

1. First you have to work out your “frame rate”, i.e. 24frames per second or 30 frames per second. 2. Then you have to decide how long you want your video to be?
For example; 15 seconds x 24 frames per second = 360 individual photos.
3.Then you need to select the photo interval this will help you work out how much time you will actually spend taking the photos; for example if you take 2.5 seconds x 360 frames=900 seconds. The divide 900/60=15 minutes.
Here is a general guide to Interval times for the beginner, of course you can play with these how you want , but these are pretty good guidelines to start with ;
Intervals
1 second= Moving Traffic, Fast Clouds, Driving Lapses
1-3 seconds=Sunsets, Sunrises, Slow Clouds, Crowds, Sun and Moon nr. Horizons and anything photo’d with a zoom lens.
15-30 seconds= Shadows across the sky
15-60 seconds= Stars
90-120 seconds= Fast growing plant
5 minutes-15 minutes= construction projects
Always shoot faster than slower if you are not sure of intervals.
Now one of the other really important things is with time lapse, to reduce what they call “flicker”, this occurs when there is changing light in the scene, usually from the sky.
You can reduce this by;
1.
A. Shooting on full Manual mode
B. Manual ISO
C. Manual White Balance
D. Manual Focus

2. Shooting at the lowest F stop possible
A. Using a manual lens if you prefer.

Of course now there is much software that will help reduce or eliminate “flicker” pp. But it always looks better to try and get rid of as much as “flicker” before you pp as this will help pp processing time.
Now this isn’t it! There is more, but I have only tried out the first two stages all very amateurish so far, so I will share with you here the first two efforts that I have made in Time lapse Photography. Primarily because it is time consuming whilst doing it, and I am still learning , and I have two batteries(you will need both fully charged), and I am still looking at suitable subject matter and locations to keep this practice up!!
Point to note, there are many different sorts of Time Lapse Software out there. I am on a limited budget and currently use “Time Lapse Tool” which is currently free. I guess if I had the money I would buy LRTimelapse, just because I already use LR5.7 and its easy exporting the files straight to the TL software.

This was my very first attempt at the apartment where I live. A good sky and a reasonably blowy day gave me the cloud movement I was looking for. I will post images of my set up in the comments as per usual! Music was added pp

 

Artistic Food

Many wonderful things have been done with food photography and my thoughts on this challenge were more on the “Artistic” when it came to foods. I have taken many “artistic” angles on food both formal and informal.

I wanted to try and change the food so that it remained recognisable but different. It all started with a simple bowl of prawn pasta and then I played with other foods which will be in the comments below as usual.

I used Topaz Studio for my post production editing on the images. Working with effects such as “Expressionism” and “Painterly” and “Surrealism” helped me achieve my “artistic” look to the food. I had great fun playing not only with the pasta image but others such as courgette flowers and chilli peppers.

Thai oranges, courgette flowers, and shallots were some of the other foods I tried with the PP program.

Landscape Night Owl

As part of my expanding experimentation with different ways to record images this week’s challenge reflects the use of my Samsung J5 mobile phone camera. This sports a 13 megapixel camera on the rear and a 5 megapixel selfie side. It also has full manual image photo taking menu and I can take pretty much anything with it even in low light.

Then I downloaded an app from Google store called “night vision Camera” which turns your humble mobile phone into a night vision camera! Something that would be prohibitively expensive for night photographers. Trust me it really works! You can adjust the amount of grain or clarity and light within the night vision. I am so excited to be able to work with this kind of technology. Finally in the hands of the ordinary photographer

I found that using the light in the camera (torch) I got better images as night vision does rely on there being a small amount of light to pick up on anyway. Infra-red light is even better AKA television remote light, but that would not get me the images I wanted.

This is my first foray out with this and so my subject was not very inspiring, I can’t wait to get out in the countryside with it and see what I can capture, I am so looking forward to seeing how the texture of plants and possibly animals shows up and how good it really is?

One thing to note, I did find that the original file name was too long for Lr5 to cope with when saving as jpgs. So I had to go back to the original folder and rename all the files( I usually take the last five numbers as these tend to be different) this sorted the problem out and I was able to save them without problems.

other images that I played with different settings during the taking, also some indoor images to show how well it works!

Portrait Hands

o, Hands it is. Great fun playing with different hand positions and different effects, in fact this week was all about effects! So trying out the effects already in my PSE12 and some plugins I had added really gave me good idea of what amazing software I have at my disposal.
The one I finally chose is the last one of all the experiments, as is usually the way…Kaleidoscope, but there were some close ones like plastic wrap.

Some of the other images that came from this exercise; Plastic wrap, Negative, Green fingers and zoom burst.

Portrait Child Candid or posed

The Image I chose came from a visit to Myanmar, from the boatman who took us round Inle Lake. His family lived in a traditional wooden stilted house on Inle Lake. During the Holidays when not at school these children helped their family with wrapping sweets for the mother to sell at the local Lake markets to support the family income. It became very apparent at how poor they were yet they made me most welcome into their home and showed me what and how they lived. None spoke English and I do not speak Burmese! But we still managed to communicate in a few broken English words via the fisherman and my couple of Burmese words. I also realised how much the (reasonably small amount) of money would contribute to this family’s household income. We had not gone through an agent or tourism package, we had instead trusted out instincts and paid the same we would have had to pay a tour operator for the “whole day” trip! The hospitality was the warmest I had received anywhere and I am pleased that I did not hesitate to pay him the going “tourist” rate.

Well this week’s challenge was a bit of an epic fail! Every time I tried to get this challenge done in the vicinity of children it looked like I was being creepy. It would seem that here in Thailand people have got just as suspicious and distrusting about people (even female) taking images of children. Yes I did try and talk to people but they wanted the parents to be in all the shots, which kind of defeated the object. Not wishing to be picked up by the Thai Police for taking pictures of peoples children without consent or from a distance I looked at a previous shoot I did in Myanmar.
Here the Children and parents are still essentially a part of a still trusting society. Taking their images neither bothered them or they posed anyway but not in a false way if you get my meaning?
I had many great images from many great moments from my 3 week trip to Myanmar and my photo observations of its people (inc. children) so finding the key image I have chosen was not a difficult one. Children are everywhere and the time I was there was the School holidays. Many of the children either work paid to do a living as the children I photographed at Kalaw Railway station selling fruit and veg to people taking the train back to Inle Lake. Or they were on their way back home from short holidays at Kalaw. Or as in the Young Novices at Inle Lake South interested in meeting new people and without fear or distrust allowed me to take their photographs.

Portrait Environmental Show a subject in their natural habitat. Their place of work or hobby

I visited Dan Kwian Pottery village just in Nakhon Ratchasima province.
Out of the three potters I photographed I chose this woman, this image was taken after a lovely chat and discussion on the usual; “where are you from?” and so on. I asked her if I could take some photos of her at work and took several. I also do a lot of street and people photography so this was well within my comfort zone.
I walked round and took images from differing angles; I love the depth of field I got in this picture. The pot in the foreground sets the scene and leads your eye to the subject of this image. Her workplace is framed by the beautiful Bokeh in the background.
This for me is personally one of my favourite images I have shot all year

Artistic Transportation

“Samlor Rider”

Samlors are disappearing fast in Korat in favour of the king of transport the moped or motorbike and the ever fast growing car population!
Samlors are now primarily used by locals and are offered by the older generation within the Old City of Korat in Thailand.
Samlors are a slow and leisurely way of getting around and I wanted to capture this mode of transport as part of this challenge before it disappears, which it probably will in the next ten to fifteen years.
An interesting fact emerged when I was researching these fast dating forms of transport: Samlor means three wheels “Sam” is the Thai word for 3 and “Lor” is the Thai word for wheel =Samlor!!

small collage of some things I tried out but decided to go with the posted image!

Shoot a landscape that packs as much color as you can find

With this week’s challenge I decided that my “Colourful Landscape” didn’t need to be wide open vistas, or mountain ranges (both of which were not available to me anyway.
I decided on my visit to Wat Ban Rai here at the gateway to the North of Thailand and at the end of my four day road trip that I would be looking to shoot images for the challenges coming up, so I was mindful of this one. I think I can say that I am very happy with this simple but colourful landscape of the Bonkers Temple also known locally as the Elephant Temple. There were many other faces of the colour of this Landscape but I like this one the best!

Artistic Patterns

Well I started off with one image that I had taken a couple of weeks ago specifically for this challenge. I had wondered was I missing the point so on my travels looked for other images that I could make that would be suitable for this, but I still came back to the same image.

While I liked the original image in its own right I wanted to push it a bit further with the “inspiration” side of the challenge. I knew it would be ok as was but I wanted to create even more pattern and rhythm into the image.

I turned to my PSE12 with some plug ins I have collected and played with various sets within the collection. Water Ripple, Lattice and Fractalis styles were applied to the original image. I found it interesting that as I pushed the plug ins some of them would change the image beyond recognition, which is not what I wanted. So I hope what I have produced retains some of the original image.

Landscape Urban-scape

So this weeks challenge I had been looking forward to so much I shot it two weeks ago. Main highway through my current hometown(Korat). walking over walkway from one side to the other gave me this fab view of the traffic which on a staurday was building up fast. It’s a bit like a race track dual carriageway most of the time and a lot of heavy traffic.

When i first looked at this image I thought it was quite boring and uninteresting until I started to play around with the editing again. I wanted to get a grimey/heavy traffic look as it ias a harsh place down on that road unless your in a car.

I used Nik HDR Pro to create the HDR effect and then tweaked the contrast and some other settings until I got this finished image.

Red

Anyone who has ever experimented with shutter speed knows that long exposures can yield some pretty interesting results. Whether it’s light painting at night or capturing the motion blur of a running river, long exposures can truly transform an image. A physiogram is a slightly different take on long exposure projects like light painting. It’s a technique that can easily be done in your living room, with no assistant required. Although the resulting images may look complex, the process to create a physiogram is actually very simple.

I had a great idea for the red part, how about using a rear bicycle lamp like this:

I had much fun and many attempts at creating these wonderful red spyrographic photographs. Below is the set up in my small windowless room.

And this is my favourite of all the images I took

Making Physiograms by Nicky Rhodes A free  downloadable PDF guide which helped me a great deal when starting this project

 

 

Landscapes: Abandoned

Interestingly I had already shot two or three other projects to cover this week! But whilst away on a two week road trip I found an even more perfect shoot to cover every angle of the description.

First I will start with the story of this image from the Information given on the board outside this building.

The Grand old Teak House has witnessed incursions, and revolutions and invasions for more than 100 years and every joint, knot and plank reeks of Thai history.
It bespeaks heritage of the finest kind, yet today sits in shambles, tied to a future of despair because of beaurocratic red tape and unwillingness to restore it to its magnificent former glory.

Only one man seems prepared to pour his heart and soul and money into Khum Wichai Racha House, Veera Star, a 66 year old retired Vietnam war veteran, the house his love that brings nostalgia into his life. But it has cost him –dearly. He has lost everything possibly even his last home in Bangkok in his efforts to reclaim the house.

Mr. Veera found the house in 1992; it was in very bad condition. Its tattered timbers covered with vines and twisted out of shape. With his wife’s blessing he decided to buy the two storey house hip-roofed teak house from its owner for 4 million baht. It launched a personal adventure using his personal savings to try and restore it. In fact in the first five years he had spent 6 million baht. The house began to take on a new revitalised look. It soon began to eat into savings and he sold other properties to continue the work, but these were also running out!
He sold the last ten of his other properties and a durian orchard, with no more cash flow the debts began to rise, finally the house itself was seized by the bank!

Mr. Veera turned to the Finance ministry of fine Arts, it said it would it would help but nothing happened. Today a total of 10 million baht is outstanding on the property and it’s land, he has given 1 million to the bank and there is 9 outstanding. Today the Bangkok Commercial Asset Management manages the estate. So here it stands waiting for someone to either pay off the debt or realise it’s historical worth or for the bank to sell it and it be made into something else?

So you see once I saw this building in its current state I felt that I had to tell it’s story….