The long now

Recently I created this short experimental piece based on the idea of a long exposure timelapse. I was trying to come up with a way to create the effects and style often seen in long exposure photography, but in motion. A lot of timelapse videos seem to have something rushed about them, and I wanted to create a more Zen-like feel, as it were.

My first thought was to take a number of long exposure photos, and create a time lapse out of those in the usual manner. The problem with that is that, because of the long exposure, you can only create one or two frames per minute. If you were to create a timelapse sequence out of those images, any motion would seem incredibly fast, quite the opposite of what we set out to achieve.

Then I came across a Final Cut Pro plugin named Long Exposure, created by CHV Plugins, that blends together a number of frames before and after the current frame, thus creating a long exposure effect out of regular, short exposure frames.

An added benefit is that this helps a lot to reduce any flicker because of differences in exposure of individual frames in the original footage. This usually results from the lens not opening up to the exact same aperture for every shot, even though it’s set to manual. There are workarounds to avoid this, but we won’t go into too much technical detail here.

One drawback of this way of working is that you can’t do any slider moves or any other forms of camera motion during the shoot, since that will blur everything in the shot. Only the parts of the image that don’t move will end up not being blurred. Of course you could apply some zooming or panning in post, or do some compositing to simulate camera motion. In this case I decided to keep it very simple though. I’m planning to experiment some more with this techique in the future. Stay tuned...

Edited in Final Cut Pro X, graded with Magic Bullet Looks.

Soundtrack: Bane (Architect Remix) by Hecq. Get it on iTunes (and make sure to check out his other stuff)

Aperture tip - this one goes to eleven!

Sometimes you find out new things about software you've been using for years. I use Aperture for post processing my RAW images. It allows me to do almost anything I want to do to an image without having to use dedicated image editing software like Photoshop (or my personal software of choice, Pixelmator) by moving around its nifty sliders and using the brush tools.

Whenever I felt I couldn't achieve a certain look in Aperture, it was often because I wanted to do something more extreme than Aperture's sliders would allow. Let's say in the image below I want to make the sky darker for dramatic effect. In the color controls, I select the darker blue color (the one that's closest to the actual color of the sky) and drag the luminance slider all the way to the left.

The luminance value is now at -70. But what if I want to make the effect even more pronounced. As it turns out, many of the controls in Aperture go beyond the limits of their sliders. By placing the mouse on the number to the right of the slider and dragging left or right (up or down works as well) you can adjust the value over a wider range. In this case, the luminance value actually goes all the way to -100.

By the way, you can also use the little arrow key's next to the value to adjust it up or down, or just type in a number. The first option is useful for small adjustments, the latter one if you already know what the value needs to be. For a lot of the sliders in Aperture - though not all of them - the actual range is greater than what you can achieve by using the sliders alone.

Hope this was useful and inspires you to take Aperture to new extremes :-)