Folio Presentation

Title: Emptiness and Beauty

Key influence: Robert Adam for whom the Ford and freeways were key to American identity.

Subject matter: cars, traffic, freeways, geometry of Montague St Ramp

Themes: If the car is all American, then surely it must be unAustralian? But what is it we think of as Australian and where is it? Where the distant horizon, the mateship, the ethnic melting pot or the naturalness and beauty of the Bush we hold so 'sacred'? But isn't this concept of Australia rather empty (as well as hardly inclusive or unique)? Isn't there is beauty in what's a little more truthful: concrete lines stretching forever, crowded frames, looming skylines, absent movement, invisible community and 'nature' slipping in unnoticed.

(1) Timelapse
Camera: Pentax Optio S4i

Technique: Timelapse fixed in car, taking about 900 images per trip.

Software: Cyberlink DVD Suite, Picassa, PowerPoint

Purpose: capture 'centre of the road' photos: crowded frames, moody skylines, repetition and yet difference in eye-catching detail, contact and yet no contact.

Key problems: not many options to adjust image capture (any choice is for all images), low resolution images, constantly shooting into the sun, camera movement, minimal capacity to adjust image in either snapshot or 'movie' form.

Presentation 1: snapshots taken from clearest footage and arranged into collages.
Presentation 2: clearest 4 pieces of footage minimally adjusted so they run for the same time and placed in a single frame to play simultaneously. I can't upload that to Blogger.

(2) Still Photos
Camera: Pentax Optio S4i, Pentax k20

Technique: stills around car parks, photos snatched while driving, around Montague St Ramp with tripod to maximise depth of focus.

Editing: straightness along horizontal axis, colour cast, cropping out unwanted details and re-framing, removing details at pixel level, colour temperature, light adjustment, sharpness filter, glow filter.

Software Picassa

Purpose: Capture geometry with absence of movement, cars or people, find beauty and lines, the invasion of nature, capture cars with the absence of movement or people.

Key problems: shooting into the early morning sun, images with strong light/dark constrast, unwanted details, lens distortion, not being physically capable of getting just the right angle.

Presentation 3: we can examine individual images, but I've also placed them into a presentation to display them in an order I think makes sense.

W10-11 Process Progress

So how's it all going?

Timelapse Photography
I have steadfastly recorded my journeys along the Ring Road and Westgate. I have discovered things like: I'm always trvalling into the sun which washes out the photos some of the time. I've experimented with changing the ISO down to 50 and try to remember to set the white balance appropriately.

The Velcro lasts a couple of trips before it needs changing: the hold seems to loosen and then the camera moves around too much. The stickiness gets reduced each time I remove the strip and I have to remove it from the camera every time I want to upload files and change batteries.

I had been considering creating electronic flick books, but now I'm toying with the idea of taking the four 'best' sequences, editing them so they are all the same length (speeding up and stretching out as appropriate) and then presenting all four in one frame and playing them simultaneously.

As usual, I started with no idea how to do this. Searching for tutorials on how to do this in movie software didn't yield anything useful, however, a quick test seems to show that this works:

• edit clips in a movie suite to adjust to same length
  (inc emphasising anything, cutting etc, but I can't adjust picture quality)
• embed four clips on a PowerPoint slide
  (selecting automatic play and looping)
• Save as PowerPoint Show
  (automatically opens as a Slide show and closes on exit).

I have also found that both movie and photo software, like Picassa, allow one to take snapshots from clips. I thought I could present collections of snapshots as a series of collages (also a feature of Picassa). My reasoning is that snapshots are low resolution, so they are not really editable (a 3 min clip is about 30Mb and I'm taking 15 shots a second x 1/10 of the speed...so without doing the calculation, that's not big!) so I need to present the snapshots usefully without removing any more pixels.

Still Photos
I must admit I did get bored of doing the time lapse, so in the last week I developed a tendency to rip the Optio S4i off the Velcro when I saw something interesting on the road and try and take a shot...exactly what I said I wouldn't do. However, I think my stupidity has yielded a few photos I want to use.

And, as I've had the Optio S4i on me a lot of the time because of shooting the time lapse journeys, I've been able to take about 100 shots in and around car parks. Standing in one of La Trobe's ocean-sized car parks, surrounded by cars it *finally* occurred to me...oh, this is a good place to shoot material for my folio without needing to set up special times for shooting! So I've been shooting oceans of cars, looking at shiny reflective surfaces and bits of "nature" falling on cars. While the subject matter and ideas are unchanges, this is not at all, what I'd anticipated collecting images of.

The downside of all these shots is that they are 2.7Mb (the big Pentax yields 11Mb images), there is not a lot of room for editing, so I will have to choose wisely and edit sparingly.

Anyway, it wasn't until yesterday, 20 May, I managed to drag myself down to Montague St. Between tiredness, having a cold and it being cold...I just couldn't seem to prioritize it. Did a 3 hours shoot taking 200 photos in and around the area.

As a side note, I met a foreman who told me about the cost of the geometric pieces around the freeway ($9M each) and the difficulty in fitting together the panels (like a jigsaw). There's one door in each - and an on-going 'battle'over the one key - and a stair up the inside. Apparently, skateboarders have discovered it as a venue, but the graffittists haven't.

The funny thing was, that I had intended to use this as a vneue to shoot full on traffic. However, what actually happened was I aimed to take most shots without traffic at all. Possibly, it was because it was a smoggy day and the colours weren't so great against all the grey of the concrete or maybe it was because after doing shots of all the geometry, when I started including the road, there was something more appealing about the road being empty than full.

Together, I like the contradiction all this sets up: car parks full of immobile cars, impinged upon by nature and freeways with a non-natural beauty of their own, but free of cars the purpose for which they were built.

If I have the energy I'd like to do one more shoot around Montague St, but at night (with the hideous tripod that I nearly kicked across the car park)...but we'll see.

I'll be doing some careful filing and selecting today and some editing on Photoshop at VU in Week 12.

W9 - Positioning the camera for Time Lapse

Yesterday evening, I took my first on the road Time Lapse footage. This is not the car I'll be using, but I was able to wedge the Pentax Optio S4i between the dash and windscreen on the RHS. It certainly worked as the footage shows reducing my 20 minute journey to 14 seconds:



However, I can see that the positioning of the camera is critical to what I capture. This image shows too much of the sky and on-coming traffic and everything seems so far away. The idea in my head is of a view that feels like I'm on top of the traffic ahead of me.

I note that my journey to and from Bundoora takes 40-60 minutes, so this would give me a footage time of about 45 seconds. I probably need to slow it down to 1/50 (90 sec) or 1/20 (270 sec) in order to extract footage of traffic jams.

After this, I took photos from my car with the camera held in the various positions from which it might be possible to attach the camera to some part of the car:

Dash in front of driver:

From head rest on passenger side:

From in front of rear view mirror:From dashboard close to window on the right hand side:

Centre of Dashboard:

I think it's quite clear that the "Dash in front of driver" is the best position although it still feels like the car in front is so far away, but I think that's the best I can do for this exercise in the time frame.

Next, I tried various methods of fixing: packing/gaffer tape, blutac, rubber bands and double-sided Velcro. Rubber bands (cable ties or velcro ties) would work for the rearview mirror, but not for the dash. Blutac wasn't sticky enough and tape didn't hold the camera steady or prevent from tipping over! from this low weight camera, the Velcro seems the best option, holding it in exactly the right place. If I find out why the time lapse on the heavy and bulky Pentax 20kd isn't working, this method would be unlikely to work.

It has also occurred to me that I could also tape the little camera to the rearview mirror or even the wingmirror for completely different footage...?

W9 - Folio and Time Lapse and Multiple Exposures

Shooting my folio:

(1) Fixed point shoots of the Westgate Fwy, Montague St, South Melbourne

I will use a mixture of hand held and tripod shooting and a mixture of cameras. I hope to visit several times to explore different light, weather and traffic conditions. I'm not sure if I'll rigidly cover the same vantage points or just wander where ever it seems safe and interesting.

Multiple exposure and colour: What I want to show is a place of go that is stopped and a place of interaction without meeting. I'm wondering if multiple exposures will give me a useful effect to show this stop-starting and featuring traffic lights and red might be important.

Structure: Perhaps, looming concrete structures from extreme angles will show a hemmed-in-ness, a powerful force acting against the car sold to us as a source of personal freedom.

Patterns: It would be great to get shots through driver side windows of vacant faces or just masses of cars that look the same. in other words, an emphasis on sameness and repetition - we are encouraged to take on the car as integral to our character and the modern Western perception of the self is a unique individual.

If this area just doesn't work (especially in terms of safety) my back-up location is Footscray Road overpass or, perhaps, one of the bolte Bridge overpasses.

I hope to deliver 6-10 photos.


(2) Time lapse shots along Ring Road

In a discussion with Stuart last week, he suggested that I might be able to fix a camera to a head rest or gaffer tape a mini-tripod on the dashboard. I've yet to try this out and I can see issues concerning camera weight and focus (because of its distance from the windscreen).

We also talked about ways to take photos while moving and time lapse photography seems like a viable option if what I want to show is footage of cars in traffic jams. Stuart suggested searching for Hacker packs. I don't think I'm going to need to do that.

Pentax Optio S4i
Press Mode, Video icon, OK and Menu.
Use up and down arrows to scroll down to Fast Fwd movie.
Use <> to select one of the options (off, x2, x5, x10, x50, x100) and OK.
This reduces the frames per second from 15 (for a video) to a fraction of that. Options range between 1/2 and 1/100.

I just used 1/100 to shoot a 1.25l bottle of ice melting over 10 hours reduced to 7.5 minutes of video (I'm hoping to speed it up more and reduce the time to 90 seconds).

This footage would be presented as a movie clip and edited together in Microsoft DVD Maker.

Pentax 20kD
Information sources: http://www.digital-slr-guide.com/pentax-k20d-guide.html and http://www.pentaximaging.com/files/product/K20D%20Manual.pdf, from p.120.

Press Menu button and select Rec mode.
Scroll down to Interval Shooting and press right arrow twice to turn interval shooting on.
Select each option (up and down arrows) and edit to suit (left and right arrows):

Interval (between shots)
Number of shots: 1-99
start trigger: Now or Select Time (press trigger to start shooting)
start time: alter for hours and/or minutes until shooting starts (up to 24 hrs)

At 10s intervals, 99 images covers 16.5minutes.
5s = 8.25 min
15s = 24.75 min.

Press OK.

The trouble is I haven't got it to work yet and I've no idea why.

I think this camera would yield shots I would select, compile and shrink resolution in Abobe Bridge, upload to Flickr and convert into an electronic flick book using Flickbookr (see previous entry).

The disadvantage here is that there's vastly more data management with this technique that i might not have time for and a heavier camera to support while driving but, at least, I have two options!

With this or these techniques I'll be able to set up shoot footage hand and attention free on my daily commute and, hopefully, be able to select and edit footage I can present as a movie or a flick book of about 90 seconds showing traffic that slows, stops-starts and eventually takes off again and repeats and repeats...

W8 - Flickbook options

In searching there's a terminology issue not just between Flip book and Flick Book as one or two words, but also between creating a photo version of a stop animation sequence - which is what I want - creating an on-line catalogue that one can flip the pages of (with the sound of paper being turned!) and custom designing my own hardcopy photo book where I flip over the pages!



Video
Format: Create a flip book from 16 seconds of camcorder video
URL: http://www.flipclips.com/
Cost: USD 18 printing + USD 17 postage for 1 book
Time: 10 days printing and 7 days for shipping (3 weeks).


The advantage of this is all I need to do is provide really good footage and all the formatting is down for me.



On-line Catalogue
Format: create an on-line magazine by uploading a pre-formatted PDF file
URL: http://www.pagegangster.com/examples/
Cost: looks like I could do it for free
Time: is delivered to my email account. The test I did I was still wating after 1 hour...so it's not instant.

I would have to custom design all the formatting and it doesn't give the stop animation effect, so it's better for presenting just a folio of images.



Flickbook - with work!
Format: download free software and insert and format images.
URL: http://www.blurb.com/my/dashboard
Cost: for a 120 page, soft-cover, 18x18 cm is AUD 27 + AUD 16 (priority post)
Time: 14 days for printing, 7 days for shipping

The main advantage over the Camcorder Flipclips is that I can use a much longer sequence. The disadvantage is that I'll have to learn the software and, in order to create a flip book, I'll have to arrange 60 images left to right on the RHS and then 60 images right to left on the LHS. Could be fiddly and costs the same as Flipclips!



Flickbook, manually
Format: Do it all manually. Print out the image sequence, cut out, arrange and bind.


Well, there's no software to learn, but no capability to format. But then there's no 3 weeks waiting and just the cost of a few sheets of colour laseer printing.

Method of collecting footage
Format: You Vision Video glasses from Photojojo which records up to 5 hours of video of whatever I look at. Very Maxwell Smart.
URL: http://photojojo.com/store/awesomeness/you-vision-video-glasses.
Cost: USD 149
Time: can't find out without creating an account?

This would take a lot of work to select images from in IMovie or Windows DVDMaker and then upload them to a third place to make the book. so this leads to another method...

On-line Flickbook via DVDMaker
Format: free software to download from Windows, select, import and sequence images and package to show on Windows Media Player
URL: http://download.live.com/moviemaker
Cost: 0
Time: whatever I put in.



Flickbook with potential
Format: one image a day. Set up to collect one face shot a day, for example form a built in webcam, but I suppose that one could potentially upload anything one wanted to record via one image a day.
URL: http://www.dailymugshot.com/products/flipbook
Cost: USD 9 + shipping
Time: ?


Again this is a service that does the formatting for you.




On-line flickbook
Format: on-line flickbook loop using a feed from a selected Flickr Photoset
URL: http://flickbookr.com/
Cost: 0
Time: instant



To use this all I'd have to do is upload my images to Flickr and put them in one photoset. On this website I then type in my username and the name of the photoset, the speed of transition and click the button! The disadvantage is that it doesn't have the physical sensation and satisfaction of the book, but there's no new software to learn or massive amounts of formatting, so I reckon this is a good compromise.

W8 Personal Photo Assignments

Each week I've been setting myself little photo assignments to try and get familiar with the tripods, camera, its capabilities, my capabilities - including physical - explore a simple object, and the effects of composition, light, f number and so on.

This week I've looked at a cardboard packaging that held glasses, which I noticed had great shadows making the box look maze or city-like. The shot I put up at Flickr was not a shot in focus as there was something about lack of focus that increased the mystery of the shapes and shadows and made it more abstract. The in focus shots just looked like a box and failed to capture what I thought I'd seen:

I've also looked at a still life of some over-ripe fruit, which follows on from my exercise last week to look at the colour and effect of light on decay. I may set up another shoot for this one as the light was fluoro at night and it took me a while to get the right white balance setting, but once I did the images seemed to lose a vibrancy. Again, the shot I liked the best was an "error". The lens on this Pentax is very heavy so that when I set the camera up with a tripod and aim it downwards, the zoom tends to slip, which gives this curious movement effect:

I've also been thinking about feedback for the composition of this unit again. One thing that's struck me amongst the huge amount of history / technique / practice / art-making / hardware / software etc that such a unit skates across in 12 studios is that the unit doesn't actually include very much actual photography, as in putting into practice the sort of things we're learning. hence, my little exercises.

It would seem to me that in combination with developing our Photostream in Flickr and contributing to the Group Photostream that each week a little shooting exercise could be set and the results posted here. This would develop student ability to interpret assignments metaphorically / creatively / broadly as well as get practice with equipment and software and all this would go towards developing skills to create the final portfolio. At the moment, there's no assignment incentive to contribute to Flickr or show development.