| Joined: | Mon Apr 2nd, 2012 |
| Location: | South Lakeland, UK |
| Posts: | 4066 |
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On Tuesday morning, some lads started taking off the old tiles. Ah ha, so it's a new roof job... Suddenly my mind went into overdrive... How about doing some time-lapse?
I hastily dug out my D200, tripod and pinched the 18-105 lens off the D3100, being the handiest lens for this range. Within minutes I was up and running, my biggest query was what interval between exposures. I expected this to last for several days, I have no previous experience of this sort of thing, so I guessed at 1 minute interval between each exposure. The camera was set on NEF capture, which I normally use with the D200. Next day I changed to medium JPEG to save space all round, and to speed up the image processing, after all this will only end up as a video! I wanted to get it set up as quickly as possible because these lads were shifting tiles really fast.
The battery was only lasting about 250 exposures but fortunately I have four batteries so I could charge them faster than I was using them. After 3 days of 'filming' the job, I have 1300 frame usable exposures which produce a movie of about 56 Seconds @ 24fps, I have deleted any oof images and most with no activity. I am expecting perhaps another half day of activity before the roofers finish.
I was in a quandary, should I tell them I was 'filming' them? I didn't want to for two reasons, I wanted it to be candid and secondly, I didn't want to be a distraction to them working and knowing some old geezer was filming them... On the other hand, I didn't want to waste any more time on the project if they objected to me 'filming' them.
This morning after two and a half days, I off loaded a rush version of the video onto the iPad, HORRAY! at last, a use for it!!! LOL I took it round to show them, at that stage it was 29 Seconds long, they loved it! Can we have a copy? Will I be putting it on Facebook? ---- Well, maybe YouTube, If nobody objects .
I have decreased the exposure interval from one minute to twenty seconds to make the viewing smoother and the clip a little longer. I have deleted a few oof images and now set the AF to off! I think it may have been birds flying through the frame as the camera is about to release the shutter. I am using Aperture priority to cope with the varying lighting levels but I don't want the dof changing all the time, which it would if I had used Shutter priority.
I have been processing the images in Lightroom, making adjustments to the images and cropping to a video 16:9? format. Adjusting the first image and then Synchronising the rest, makes processing a doddle. I exported them to a new folder renaming them to "frame - ###" sequential numbers.
I created the animation in Photoshop CC, once I got the hang of it, it's a doddle, quite quick and with loads of options. Once the video is rendered, I exported it to the iCloud PhotoStream, in seconds the video was delivered to my 'iPhone and iPad. Amazing!
I showed the video to the home-owner on my 'phone and he was amazed, he wants a copy too!!!
I am stuck to know what music to use, it needs to be something very fast, to match the animation, I have some notes buzzing through my brain but I can't put a title to them. Something like an Irish jig... Needs to be out of copyright though... Any ideas?
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Robert.