Friday 20 January 2012

Always be ready for that opportunist time-lapse

This was in no way at all planned.

Lucinda and I were having a spot of lunch when we saw the field at the back of our house bing ploughed.

I hesitated for a few moments then I thought it would be a great fun little time-lapse.

I dashed up stairs and worked out the framing to include more sky than foreground as the clouds were superb.

I set the Canon 5d MkII to small jpg, plugged in the TC-80N3, shooting a frame every 6 seconds on my Manfrotto MT057C3 with super stable MH057M0 ball head and let it run for 2 hours.

Oh, I forgot to mention I used a Lee Filter holder with a hard .6 ND Graduated filter on the sky.



I used a 24-105mm 'L'Series lens

It went quite well but I was a little disappointed with the colour so I adjusted the contrast and saturation on all 1500 ish images in Capture One Pro 6, just to make it 'Pop' a little more.

I then made a sequence in Quicktime Pro, and cut it together with this great piece of music by Douglas Black Heaton in FCP X.

Great music makes or breaks a video.

I'm quite pleased with it, as there has been quite a lot going on today in the office.

It goes to show if in doubt shoot it.

Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

But the moment never comes again.

5 comments:

Libby said...

What great luck that came along with your idea. And the birds were quite the bonus here. The quality on the small jpegs is not bad.

I'd be proud of a piece like this. I just need to cut the umbilical to my desk and go out and do stuff. Right now I'm in learning and acquisition stages with shooting video. I've been editing for several years, and I've found that's where part of my creative heart lies. So I inch forward a little each day with the help of great people such as yourself. Kind Regards, Libby

Andor said...

Sometimes the best opportunity indeed comes when you would not even think about.
Nice time-lapse!

Unknown said...

Thanks Guys!

The most powerful thing we can do as creatives is just to get up off our backsides, no matter what the out come.


Regards

Drew

ramin said...

Opportunistic time-lapsing is always cool. My first (and so far latest) time-lapse was created over a year ago when the fields surrounding us were swarmed over by 70 000 people for almost a week. Rigging up a camera to shoot 1/minute for 7 days was a bit of a challenge.

Unknown said...

Hi Ramin,

That sounds really interesting.

Do you have a link?

Regards

Drew