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.
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