A long shot

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.

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Getting into the flow with 500px

A while ago, photo sharing site 500px.com launched their new interface. Where Flickr hasn’t updated their interface for years (that’s decades in internet time), it’s nice to see 500px set an example of where things might be going in the future of online photo sharing. The new interface looks decidedly fresh and has a couple of things I really like:

Flow

500px took a good look at what makes for a compelling presentation for images and came up with “flow”. Just like Facebook’s timeline, it’s based on the idea that a stream of information doesn’t necessarily look very compelling when presented in a straightforward grid or list. Instead, they use a dynamic layout that shows images in different sizes and aspect ratios. In this format, you get a nice presentation of your own images mixed with the ones you liked. But it doens’t stop there, which brings us to the next topic...

Curation

Online photo sharing is great, but there’s always the question of how to find photographers and images you really like among the millions of mediocre uploads. There has to be some mechanism to filter the good stuff from the rest. And not just the good stuff in general, but the stuff that’s good according to your personal taste.

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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 :-)

Beyond the obvious

Sometimes it can be fun to think beyond the obvious when deciding on the look of a photo. The above image for example was taken on - believe it or not - a bright sunny day in Rotterdam. You can see the original here. While it was a nice architecture shapshot, I decided to see what else I could do with it.

Photography is often about leaving things out, and focussing on one particular thing. The original shot was quite cluttered, with lots of lines from the glass roof, the buiding, and the tree on the right hand side. So the first thing I did was crop the image to get rid of some of the distraction. A square format seemed to work well here.

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Recording dual system audio outdoors or in noisy environments

Some time ago I found myself on a boat, capturing footage of whales off the beautiful coast of South Africa. In between shooting the whales (with the camera that is) I was trying to get some good shots of Jason, co-owner of Ivanhoe Sea Safaris, who was explaining all sorts of interesting facts about the whales.

I was using my trusty combo of Canon 5D mark II plus Zoom H4n to record some decent audio. I quickly found out however, as soon as there was some wind - which is all the time if you’re out at sea - or the engine started roaring, the audio from the in-camera mic quickly became unintelligible, making it a challenge to sync the audio with PluralEyes, or even manually.

If the H4n were mounted on the camera I could have easily fed it’s signal into the 5D's external mic input, but  I find that setup ergonomically cumbersome, plus the noise from focusing or merely touching the camera will be audible. So in this case my wife/assistant Brit was operating the H4n separately. Running an audio cable between two continuously moving people on a wobbly boat with other passengers moving around at the same time would not have been very practical, so afterwards I came up with a different solution.

The basic solution: wirelessly transmit the audio to the camera

Using my Sennheiser wireless kit, it’s possible to transmit the signal from the H4n to the 5D, giving you a nice clean in-camera audio signal for syncing in post. This setup works for any noisy or windy environment, where the camera's built-in mic might not alway be able to capture enough of the dialog or interview audio.

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