Category Archives: Photography General

General discussion of photographic topics.

Creating movies from an image sequence

Combining image sequence into a proves movie file

  • ffmpeg -f image2 -pattern_type glob -i ‘*.png’ -vcodec proves -profile 2 -r 25 -s 1920×1080 test.mov

Deflickering

  • Import movie into FCPX, delay by one frame and blend with darken
  • https://vimeo.com/85966287
  • http://joegiampaoli.blogspot.de/2015/04/creating-time-lapse-videos-mostly-in.html

Intervals (time between the start of each shot) where do I start?

-The easiest ‘one size fits all’ way around intervals is to get them as ‘tight’ as possible. So if your exposure is under 1 second simply take a shot every second BUT with many cameras (as mentioned in the ‘stills or video’ section) can’t purge the buffer quick enough (especially shooting RAW) so you’ll have to make sure your buffer clears before taking the next shot. On the other hand many bodies can do like 3 frames per second JPG continuous if you simply lock down the exposure button (most interval timers have this function).
-On the other hand you’re sucking up memory quickly by going as tight as possible and it can be overkill, so one approach is to shoot some sample frames and scroll review them on camera. This will give you quick feedback on the resulting footage so you can adjust… maybe longer intervals will be fine, maybe shorter will give you what you’re looking for…
-Some ballpark interval starting points to try out…
Fast moving clouds: 1 second
Slow moving clouds: 10 seconds
Sun moving across a clear sky: (wide) 20-30 seconds
Stars moving across the sky: (wide) between 20-60 seconds
Sunsets close up: 1-2 seconds
Crowds of people: 1-2 seconds
Plants growing eg cucumber vines: 2 minutes
Shadows moving across the ground: 10-20 seconds
Note these times can change drastically depending on the local conditions, and the aesthetic look you are trying to achieve, so the best answer is to get out there and practice for yourself to see what works for you. As a general rule of thumb, any tighter or telephoto shots need much faster intervals.

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Gospel Shooting

Although I consider myself a musician and some kind of a singer, I never attended a gospel workshop. My wife Alice signed up for one of these the other day, but I decided to have a quiet weekend instead, planning to attend the final Gospel Concert on Sunday. Guess what happened ? On Saturday I was asked to photograph the rehearsal. Same on Sunday, and in addition I audio recorded the concert. That much about my quiet weekend….

I nevertheless enjoyed the two days a lot. I had never shot a choir like that and thought it could be a nice challenge. The conductor appeared on Saturday and taught the 60 amateur singers nine songs by heart and without any lead sheet. Impressive to see their great performance on Sunday. So how should I capture the dynamic event with still photography ? My final way of working was to shoot by selecting a fixed exposure time and let the camera choose the aperture [ S mode ]. Using exposure times of 1/15 to 1/40 of a second gave me nice smear fx. You can see people clapping their hands and moving while singing. But I needed a bit more definition in the final image. I added a flash, which fired at the end of the exposure [ rear mode ]. This helped me to capture the motion and froze the shot at the end of the exposure. The second challenge was to capture the size of the room with the audience during both the rehearsal and concert. I subsequently had to increase my ISO settings to 800/1000, which as a downside increased the noise a bit. Lightroom helped me to correct this by applying +20 noise reduction to the images across the board.

On Sunday evening I came home with 500 images and down selected 200. In the gallery you can see the best of them. Hallelujah!

choir01.pngchoir02.pngchoir03.pngchoir04.png

 

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