A long shot
17 July 2012 | Posted in behind-the-scenes, tips, workshops On July 7 and 8 I had the pleasure of attending the Fine Art Long Exposure Photography workshop organized by Marc Koegel and Joel Tjintjelaar in Domburg, The Netherlands. I was shooting some behind-the-scenes footage, and the (very) short film above was created from some of those shots.
My goal was to give the various shots a look that you would normally only get from a long exposure photograph, but in motion. If you have been following this blog, you know that I’ve been experimenting with this technique for a while. If you’re interested, read on for a little explanation of how these shots were created.
The different shots you see here all required individual processing, using various layers, masks, blend modes and time remapping. Since I don’t want to make your head explode, I’m going to focus on one of the simpler shots: the lighthouse.
The process starts with importing the shots into Final Cut Pro X. I let Final Cut Pro transcode the footage to ProRes so that it will better withstand all to post processing we’re going to apply to it.
Footage imported into Final Cut Pro XI shot using the CineStyle profile, and turned down in-camera sharpening, contrast and saturation, in order to capture as much information as possible, without loosing any detail. If you look at the images straight out of camera, you’ll see that it looks quite flat and a bit soft as a result. This will all get fixed later.
The original, unprocessed shotFor the purpose of creating the long exposure look, I specifically let the camera record for a couple of minutes at a time, to capture enough cloud movement.
The next step is to create a sped-up version of the clip, so the cloud movement becomes clearly visible. There is no rule as to how much you should speed it up, but with slow cloud movement like we had on this day, a value of around 5000% will do the trick, so that’s 50x normal speed. The next step is applying the long exposure filter, that I’ve written about before. Since this only works in older versions of FCP, I first have to export my sped-up clip as a ProRes file, and open it up in FCP 6.
The long exposure filter blends a large number of frames before and after the current frame, thus creating a sort of motion blur. It also evens out the rapidly changing light on the lighthouse in this case, which is a nice side effect. I find that in order to get a convincing look, I have to set it to blend between 100-300 frames for each actual frame of the shot. The resulting shot looks like this:
The lighthouse shot with long exposure effect appliedWow, that looks incredibly boring. The contrasts are even flatter than before. That’s because we’re not completely there yet. After exporting the clip from FCP 6 and importing in FCP X again, it’s time for some color grading.
The sky, with it’s subtle contrasts, is going to require a different treatment than the lighthouse, so we’ll have to do some masking and layering. We’ll start with the sky. I used Magic Bullet Looks 2 to create the black & white look, because it let’s you apply various adjustments in a very flexible and controlled way. The lighthouse is a bit overexposed in here, but that doesn’t matter, since I will process it separately later.
Color grading the sky in Magic Bullet Looks 2After the sky, it’s time to do the same for the lighthouse. Don’t pay attention to the sky here, because it’s going to masked out. All that counts now is that the lighthouse looks good.
Color grading the lighthouseNow we can layer the two processed shots, with the lighthouse being the top one. The next step is creating a mask for the lighthouse. I’m not going to explain that whole process here, but this is what is looks like:
Lighthouse maskWe’ll apply the mask to the clip that was color corrected for the lighthouse. Now it’s starting to look like something:
Composite of masked lighthouse and skyA little finishing touch is sharpening the image. This is usually done to compensate for the in-camera sharpening that I turned off. Sharpening in post will look much better, and you usually need only a very small amount. In this case however, some more severe sharpening can bring out the feather-like textures in the sky. Fortunately we have the lighthouse and the sky on two separate layers, so we can apply different amounts of sharpening to each one. But wait, the heavy sharpening from the sky layer creates a halo that protrudes from behind the masked lighthouse.
Yikes! Sharpening the sky creates an ugly halo around the lighthouseThe solution is to create a third layer, which is basically a copy of the sky layer. We’ll reduce the sharpening in the original sky layer, and apply some heavy sharpening to the new one. By applying a feathered 4 point matte, we’ll mask out the part immediately surrounding the lighthouse.
New sky layer with maskThis creates a nice transition from some subtly sharpened sky around the lighthouse, to the heavily sharpened majority of the sky. This is the final result:
The final resultThis was a relatively straightforward shot to process. Some of the other ones were a lot more complex, so things can quickly get very involved. In a way this was still a shortcut though, since I’m using video footage. Better and more subtle results can be achieved when using a RAW time lapse. That takes even more time though, so we’ll leave that for next time. Hope this was useful, or at least entertaining to read...
Reader Comments (4)
Your a real inspiration in this field, and long may it continue.
@Michael - Thanks so much for the positive feedback. And yes, I'm planning to continue for a while... in fact, I'm just getting started!
@Joel - Glad you found it inspirational and I'm curious to see what you would do with this technique. Just keep in mind that a single shot might take as much time as you would normally spend on processing a still image :D