For some reason is stood out at me because (a) someone taking some pretty decent time lapse photos of stars didn't feel worthy of being "national news*", but more so (b) it got me thinking why I hadn't tried to replicate such photos before myself.
After a quick google about, one of the first links I stumbled upon was this explanation, on a blog called
This explanation (the first option described in the above blog) will likely be the process I will follow, and seems to be broken into four simple steps:
Put camera on a tripod, into Manual, put it on a large aperture (f4) and put the shutter onto bulb (admittedly this is a couple of steps in one, but oh well);
Put the camera on a high ISO, 400 - 800. I'll probably try 400 to start with;
Put on Manual Focus, and set it to infinity (8) - (double check though that any items in the foreground are also in focus before starting); and finally
Using a remote shutter cable, take a photo from anywhere between 5 and 30 mins (allegedly 30 mins gives quite a "crowd pleasing" result.
It seems to be a relatively straight forward process, which I will be sure to try next time I am camping or in a quiet place away from light "pollution".
So, has anyone else given this a try? Any tips?
On a somewhat related topic, I also stumbled across a Norwegian photographer called Terje Sorgjerd who is also in the business of taking amazing shots of quite different forms of light (stars, lightning from volcano's, the northern lights, etc)
If you have 5 minutes, I strongly suggest you watch the following videos he has created using a time lapse capture method. Amazing stuff:
*by national news, I mean "international news"... this exact story seems to have been repeated in every second online news site across Australia and the UK. If anything, it really shows we need a few more news corporations, who employ a few more real journalists! See below links for a small example!
This weekend, Simone and I headed away for a weekend on the South Coast at a little place called Potato Point. It ended up being a great opportunity to try out a few new things on my camera. In particualar, I was interested in trying to capture waves crashing over rocks using a long exposure. For some reason, I always appreciate these types of shots when I see other people create them, so I thought I would try for myself (see here for an example of what I was aiming for: http://news.deviantart.com/article/121175/)
It was an overcast afternoon, which gave me a chance to snap a few shots a bit earlier than would have been possible had the sun been shining brightly. Despite this, I still underexposed my first couple of shots to make up for the fact that there was still a bit of sun about. The greyness of the afternoon didn't however create the most exciting or contrasting backgrounds.
Anyway, using my tripod, precariously perched on jagged rocks, I tried about 4 or 5 different locations over the course of an hour, and managed to come away with a few shots that I was happy with.
f22, 4 secs, ISO100, -4 exp, B&W post processing
f20, 3.2secs, ISO100
f8, 1sec, ISO100
Check out my flickr Stream for some other shots of the trip, was really happy with what I came away with.
On a side note, I have started playing about with adding borders to some of my pictures. For certain shots I feel it adds to the impact. I use a free program called "Frame Fun" (available here: http://framefun.en.softonic.com/) which is quite easy to use and can batch process large groups of pics. The borders are a bit of an overkill for the small shots on here (as Blogger automatically adds a plain white background), but they seem to look good if you enlarge individual images.
Simone came home the other day after going to a euro vision "party" and told me that they used some cool effects for the intro's and outro's of the show. Curiosity got the better of me so after a bit of googling I found out they were displaying video that used an effect known as "tilt shift". So what is "tilt shift"?
Essentially, it is a form of photography (or video as it turns out) in which the focus has been altered (usually digitally) to give a perception of the scene being miniaturised. In effect, it makes ordinary cityscapes look like photos taken of Cockington Green.
A good example (of the video format of this effect) is the following clip I found of the Coachella Music Festival in the United States:
In terms of photography, a simple Google image search will reveal endless examples, but I was keen to give it a try myself. Unfortunately, I had not taken any pictures for this particular purpose, so I feel my shots are a bit too far "back" from the action to be as impressive as they could. Generally, I think this effect would work best if there can be people or vehicles in the scene to add a greater sense of perspective.
In order to make the pics, I followed this guide: http://www.tiltshiftphotography.net/photoshop-tutorial.php
It was quite easy and worked perfectly - my first time ever playing with Photoshop as well, and it has got me interested in playing around more with post-processing. I have came to realise though, that because I am colour blind, I really do have to take a stab in the dark as to whether the changes I have made are any good (colour wise)!
Anyway, here are the results, both are pics I dug up from our trips to New Zealand in the beginning of the year:
