2010 February | Chris Beaumont

f22 Project – Week 8 – Liverpool Museum

This picture is a lesson learned. With a little more patience and a little more attention to what I was seeing through the viewfinder, I would hopefully have raised the camera up about a foot so that the barriers weren’t dominating the bottom left of the frame quite so much. As it is this image is a little wonky – too much clutter and distraction taking place in the bottom third; too many lines criss-crossing over one another. I love the way the building pops off the clouds, though.

f22 Project – Week 7 – Mersey River

The weather has been relentless lately. Truly, the shittiest spell of prolonged bad weather in living memory. It’s really hampered my mojo for this project, which is a terrible, lame excuse for being lazy, but when it comes to a choice between getting comfy on the warm sofa at home and braving the barely above freezing, rainy, windy conditions we’ve been putting up with for the last 8 weeks, it’s the lazyboy every time I’m afraid.

Anyway, it’s started to ease in the last few days, and while on assignment in Liverpool on Thursday and Friday I made a point of heading down to the docks to shoot some images at f22.

I love it in Liverpool. My father is Liverpool born and bread, but I was raised in Essex. Whenever I go there, I just feel at home. I’m probably projecting a lot of psychological fantasy onto it, but I feel the place in my bones when I’m walking around. In my blood.

Anyway this is a little fuzzy for an image shot at f22 – I had my tripod extended out a bit too much and I didn’t use the timer to trigger the exposure, and it’s led to an ever so slight bit of camera wobble. It’s been pushed about a lot in Photoshop as well.

f22 Project – Week 6 – Ben Nevis

This picture is a big fat cheat. I took it a couple of years ago on a glorious week away in the Scottish Highlands, and it relates to this project only in the fact that it was taken at f22. But it wasn’t taken for this project. I pulled it from the archive because I failed to shoot an image this week. Too busy! Too lazy! I can’t remember which.

f22 Project – Week 5 – Timelapse!

Forest Hill Timelapse (Canon 5D Mkii) from Chris Beaumont on Vimeo.

This week I thought I’d try a bit of timelapse, which I guess isn’t, strictly speaking, photography, but hey, I used a stills camera, I processed the images in Lightroom, and I shot (nearly) everything at f22, so it’s almost there, isn’t it? I suppose I’m stretching the remit of the project a little this week, but I’ve only got so much time on my hands, and the idea to do this came directly from the image I shot last week, so I’m not too worried.

Timelapse is fun and frustrating in equal measure. Actually, no, it’s a lot more fun than frustrating, but that’s not to say that it isn’t very annoying when 3 hours of work ends up un-usable because of some silly mistake or oversight.

The technique is deceptively simple in concept – all you need is a camera, a good sturdy tripod, an intervalometer (a programable device to trigger the exposures on a set routine – I use the Canon TC 80n3), and lots of time. You point the camera at your scene, set your intervalometer to record an image every couple of seconds, sit back for 15 minutes or so and then gather the images together in a video editor.

In practice, however, things are inevitably not so simple, and things go wrong all the time. I don’t think I had a clean run where at least something wasn’t problematic.

Here’s what I learned about timelapse this weekend …

Don’t. Touch. The Tripod. I know this is glaringly obvious but every shot that I attempted this weekend was jittery because I kept milling about near to my tripod, moving the floorboards it was sitting on, and knocking it accidentally from time to time. The smallest disturbances register on the final render as minor but jarring blips in what should be a smooth playback.
Shooting RAW rather than JPEG – gives you a lot more flexibility in post, but (especially with the 21 mega pixel 5D mkii) means you need high capacity cards (32GB), and increases the amount of time you spend in post significantly, as you need to convert all the RAW files to JPEGs, which takes a good amount of time. Converting 32GB of RAW images into JPEGs once you’ve made some adjustments in something like Adobe Lightroom is going to take a couple of hours.
You can get an unpleasant flickering that can be fixed by using a plugin called Long Exposure from CHV-Plugins. It’s very good, but some experimentation is required with the settings to get the right look. The default settings tend to merge one frame into the next a little too much, so that all the detail from your rolling clouds is lost as everything is smoothed out too much. Pulling back a little on the Timespan slider, and changing the mix to about 75% seems to get rid of the flicker without losing too much detail.
Weather is really important. It’s been proper glum in London for the last few weeks, and grim overcast skies don’t make for a very interesting timelapse. I was waiting in vain all weekend for some fluffy clouds but they never really emerged.
High failure rate. I shot about 10 timelapses over the weekend, but I think there’s only 2 decent shots in the edited video above (shot 3 and the shot of the cross-roads with the cars). The other shots are just there as filler really, and everything else ended up useless because of some problem or other.

I’ve had way more failures than successes with timelapse so far, but it’s really fun, and very satisfying when it works. I’ll definitely be back for more. Perhaps when the weather’s improved a bit though!

Also, it would be remiss of me not to say that loads of incredible advice and guidance about how to do practically anything video related with a Canon 5D MKii is available on Philip Bloom’s website, and I got much of the info about how to shoot and treat timelapse from his site. Have a look at his most recent timlapse video ‘Sky’, along with detailed production notes, here.