Check out my latest time lapse video. I shot this back in the summer, while in southern Alberta. If you've never visited the area, you should. Amazing landscapes and fantastic people.
If you want to really get the best viewing experience, click on this link and watch it on YouTube in HD.
I'm getting itchy to get out and shoot some time lapse. There are a few projects I've got in mind for this summer and it's time to get on with them. In the mean time, I figured I would take advantage of some good storm clouds rolling through the area the other day and shoot some material from my window at work. For this, I used LapseIt Pro on my smartphone to capture the images. After capturing the images, I imported them in to Lightroom for some tweaking before rendering the video.
Here's a shot of my phone at work.
For best viewing, click here and watch it in HD on YouTube.
A couple of weeks ago, I had the opportunity to photograph the MarketStar 25th Anniversary Celebration. In addition to shooting the event, I thought it would be a good opportunity to do a time lapse project. It turned out to be a fantastic learning opportunity. Normally, when I've worked on a project, I've had some flexibility on how long it takes me to capture the various sequences that make up the final project. In this situation, I didn't have that luxury. I had a very specific time frame to capture the material that I needed. Instead of using one or two cameras and moving them around, I had to use multiple cameras, set to capture as much of the event as possible. Turns out, with the help of a couple of camera operators (thanks, Dave, Chris, and Cory), I ended up with a total of 7 cameras being used to capture images. The cameras were placed in all sorts of places, including one in a window on the 6th floor of the MarketStar building, one in the projection booth in the theater, and one suspended 30 feet in the air above the stage. All together, we captured over 17,000 still images and about 45 minutes of video. It was a lot of fun coordinating and producing this project. Overall, I'd say it was a success and I'm pleased with the results. Now, I just need to find more opportunities to do this again.
As always, for best results, click HERE and watch the video in HD.
One of my favorite places to shoot is Valley Of Fire State Park in Nevada, just north of Las Vegas. I've shot there several times before, and I look forward to shooting there many more times. It is an amazingly beautiful place with geology similar to the national parks in Southern Utah. The big difference is that it is far less busy than places like Zion, Bryce, and the Grand Canyon. And, amazingly enough, it is only about a 90 minute drive from the craziness of the Las Vegas strip. You can see some of my previous visits here, here, and here. Like I said, it's an amazing place that I look forward to shooting many more times.
As I was preparing for my recent trip to Las Vegas for work, I discovered that I would be there during the new moon, a perfect opportunity to shoot some star time lapse in Valley of Fire. I was able to make it out to the desert a couple of times while there. Here are the results:
For best viewing experience, click here and watch it in HD.
Earlier this month, I spent a significant amount of time in Las Vegas for work. It was an incredibly busy week, but I still managed to find a couple of opportunities to run out to Valley Of Fire State Park to do a little shooting. I spent most of the time shooting stars for time lapse. I managed to get in a few sequences, and I'm really pleased with how they turned out. I'll get them completed and into a video in the next few weeks. Normally with time lapse, you shoot with an interval of 1-5 (or more) seconds between each shot. This allows you to really compress time. With stars, you typically get better results if you lock down the shutter and let the camera crank out frame after frame. The beauty of this method is that you can also use the frames to stack for some star trails. Nothing better than a BOGO, right? If the frames were shot with any kind of an interval greater than the length of the shutter being open, you'd end up with blank spots in your trails. Not good. So, after rendering the video from one set of shots, I decided I'd do some stacking using my typical process (more on that later). As I had expected, the results were fantastic. Then, a suggestion from a friend prompted me to try a different method. The results were good, but there was an added bonus that really made the new method worth while. Not too shabby, two BOGOs off of the same sequence! It's like a BOGOGO.
So, for starters, here's a single frame from the sequence. You can see that getting out away from the Vegas lights was well worth it. It also helped that we were only a few days away from a new moon so there was very little ambient light. Actually, some ambient light would have lit up the crazy red rocks. The streaks you see in this and other images are the result of air traffic headed to Vegas.
This first video clip is the rendered time lapse sequence. This is made up of 438 images, each 15 second exposures, captured over a total of 2 hours. I'm very pleased with the results, can't wait to get it in with the others and add some music.
Alright, now that the time lapse was completed, it was time to build a stacked star trail image. I frequently get asked why I prefer to stack rather than shoot one long image. Well, there are several reasons. First, stacking multiple short exposures greatly reduces the amount of noise and hot pixels that you get in your image. Second, if needed, you can drop a couple of frames. Be careful with this because you start to introduce gaps in the trails. Third, it's usually a lot easier to dial in your exposure. It's far easier to shoot a 15 second frame, adjust, shoot a second frame, adjust, etc. than it is to shoot a 2 hour frame and then have to make corrections and shoot again. The first step was to export the files as .jpgs. You can do it with RAW images, but it will really tax your system. With all of the images in a folder by themselves, I use a Photoshop action from starcircleacademy.com. This is a handy tool that does a great job of stacking. This is the image, straight out of CS5 with no final tweaking.
My friend Ben made the suggestion that I give a program called StarStax a try. I figured it was worth a shot, so I downloaded and installed the program and gave it a try with the the same images as a comparison. On the first run, I tried the "Gap Filling" option. On these images, the results weren't fantastic. I think it muddied the trails too much. I can see that with the right set of images, it would be useful.
So, I wanted to give it a fair test, so I ran the stack again, this time using the standard "Lighten" setting. This time, the results were much better though I don't think there's too much difference between this and image rendered using the starcircleacadamy.com action. Again, these are straight out of the StarStax software with no final tweaking.
Really, I couldn't see a reason to use one over the other, until I realized that StarStax has a really cool feature. You can tell the software to capture and save an image after each stacking cycle. Turns out that the resulting images from this feature make for a really great time lapse.
This last image is a repeat of the first stack from CS5 with some final tweaks in Lightroom.
If you aren't from Utah, you probably don't know that Temple Square in downtown Salt Lake City gets decked out for Christmas. Because they go all out, it's pretty fantastic. At the beginning of the holiday season, I had planned on getting there a couple of time to shoot some time lapse. Well, as it normally works out, I got busy and only managed to make it there once. I grabbed my favorite shooting buddy after work one evening and we headed down. It was a lot of fun and, as you'll see in the video, it was really crowded. My gear drew a lot of attention that night, so I spent a good amount of time explaining what I was doing and how it all worked. It was a fun night and the results we brought home are pretty fantastic!
As always, for best results, view the video in HD here.
On Friday, I spent the day wandering with my son. We started at the Golden Spike historical site, watching the steam train. We spent a little time out at the Spiral Jetty and then finished the afternoon at Locomotive Springs for the sunset. Our time at Locomotive Springs was spent shooting time lapse. I had hoped that there would be more cloud action than we had, but that wasn't in the cards. Turns out the it worked out okay. I really like the subtle movement in the bit of clouds that I did capture. I've enjoyed sunset at Locomotive Springs several times, it rarely disappoints. This was no exception.
For the best viewing experience, click here and watch it in HD.
I spent a few days in Chicago this week for work. Of course, I took my camera with and found some time to get out and wander. I also shot a bunch of frames for a big time lapse project that I'm working on. Here's a few of the frames.
Yesterday morning, I got up early and headed up the hill with a couple of friends to shoot the sunrise. Sunrise turned out to be a bust, so we headed to the Old Snowbasin Highway to see what we could find. What we found was that the road was closed due to a car accident. So, we turned around and headed up to the Snowbasin ski resort, our intent was to find a spot to shoot some time lapse of the last remaining bits of the sunrise. It turns out that we ended up near one of the lifts, and had a great view of the final preparations prior to opening for the season. I'm pretty happy with the material that I shot, but I need to go back to finish the story.
Here's my latest time lapse project, shot while visiting the Utah State Fair. It was fun to shoot the rides, I didn't get to half of them, perhaps next year. An interesting side note and a warning if you plan to try this at your local fair or carnival. Beware of the carnies. You are a captive audience and they love to chat. Chances are, they won't have a clue as to what you are doing, even with repeated attempts to explain. You may get lucky and have the opportunity to chat with one or two that have the attention span of a goldfish. Good times.
As always, for best viewing results, click HERE and watch in HD.
Every year, Antelope Island hosts a Hot Air Balloon Festival. Well, if you've never been to the island, you probably wouldn't know that it is always windy out there. Really windy. So, most years, the balloons don't actually spend a lot of time in the air. In addition to the balloons, they also fly kites. Really big and cool kites. A few weeks ago, I headed out to the island to shoot some time lapse of the kites.
For best viewing experience, click HERE and watch it in HD.
This past weekend, I had the opportunity to shoot a little bit of time lapse material. Friday evening, I headed out to Antelope Island and shot a bit of the kite demos that were going on as part of the Island Stampede. On Saturday, some friends and I headed up to Ogden Valley and shot some cool storms rolling through. I haven't had time to render and build videos yet, so here's a few frames as a teaser.
A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to head to the Sandy, UT Hot Air Balloon Festival. Balloon launches are always a lot of fun to shoot, there's plenty of great images to be made. This time, I decided a little time lapse was in order.
For best viewing results, view the video in HD here.
I had the opportunity to spend the last several days in Washington DC with a group of friends from one of my photo clubs. On Sunday evening, we were all beat after several long days of walking and shooting, so we decided to wrap things up and hang out in the lounge at the hotel. One of my friends, Bean Bailey happens to be a talented crocheter and makes hats and props for newborn photography. (If you are a photographer and you shoot newborns, you really should check out her work) While we sat around, she did some catching up on her crocheting. Of course, I figured this was a great opportunity to shoot some time lapse.
For best viewing, watch the video directly on YouTube by clicking HERE.
A few weeks ago, my son and I threw a bit of gear in the car and headed up in to the Uinta mountains for an overnighter. We had nothing planned, we just wandered, fished, and took a few pictures. When it got dark, we found a camp site and slept in the back of the car. When it got light again, we continued our wandering. We had a fantastic time. Of course, it was a pretty good opportunity to shoot some time lapse.
For the best viewing experience, view it directly on YouTube in HD by clicking HERE.
A couple of weeks ago, my son and I got up before the crack of dawn and made the 90 min trek out to Rozel Point to enjoy the sunrise. Rozel is on the North end of the Great Salt Lake and is almost in the middle of nowhere. Not only is Rozel a next-door neighbor of the Spiral Jetty, it's got the remains of some old oil-exploration drilling rigs. This has become one of my favorite places to shoot, you've seen the posts in my previous work. The way storms roll in off of the lake, you just never know what kind of shooting conditions you will end up with. This particular morning, the conditions couldn't have been better. The color of the lake can vary greatly throughout the year and this day it was a nice, deep, red. The storms clouds rolling off of the lake were fantastic, and really added to the mood. Perfect opportunity to shoot some time lapse.
I'm still refining my skills and techniques with Time lapse. I've learned a lot, but I still have much to learn. There are some technical issues with this, but overall, I'm pleased with the end results. I'd love to hear your opinions, good, bad, or otherwise, in the comments below.
For best viewing experience, view the video directly on YouTube by clicking here. Be sure to bump up the quality.
As always, thanks for taking the time to stop by. Please feel free to share my work with your friends and family.
Last month, we spent some time camping near Smith & Moorehouse Reservoir. It's a fantastically beautiful area in the mountains of Northern Utah. I decided it would be worth capturing some of that beauty as a time lapse.
The other day, I decided to re-shoot a time lapse that I had shot from the windows at work. This time, I brought along the eMotimo PT to add a little motion to things. Oh, and I shot this one with my phone using the lapse it pro app. If you haven't checked out this Android app, you should. It does some pretty cool stuff and is dirt cheap. This video was shot and rendered using the app.
For best viewing, click HERE to watch it on YouTube.
Hey folks, I apologize for the lack of posting lately. It's been a busy few weeks with work and a family vacation. I've been working on a time lapse project and some computer issues have really slowed things down. Thanks for hanging in there, here's a frame from one of the sequences for my current project. I'll try to get a few more posted in the next few days.
