MORE fun with time-lapse (or stop-action) photography

Since the vernal equinox occurred yesterday (Mar 20, at around 7pm EDT), I once again took part in the annual oddball tradition of standing eggs on end.  Of course the belief that this is due to something special that only happens because of some planetary or solar alignment once a year has been totally shot down by Snopes.com, but far be it from me to let that spoil my fun.

At the magical moment, I had my dozen eggs and camera ready to go. After a frustrating ten minutes or so without one single successful standing egg, I gave in to boredom and did a little stop-action movie of an egg running around on my counter top. If I couldn't get astronomical magic to make my eggs do cool tricks, I would have to cheat, else be left empty handed after bragging about my egg-standing prowess to the kids down the street. (Yeah..I bragged)

Apparently the distraction of making the little movie was enough to limber my hands up and finally allow me to stand half a dozen eggs...tying my personal-best record set back in 19somethingorother when I was still a gullible kid who believed the equinox made the task easier.

Here is the result.  +10 bonus points to whoever can tell me the iconic early-'70s cartoon hero I reference.

Spring is just around the corner

jonquils, originally uploaded by spikepage.

...around the corner quite literally. This pretty stand of jonquils belongs to my neighbor two doors down. In spite of the image some people have of my neighborhood, there are quite a few pretty flowerbeds and gardens around here. Now that spring is coming, I will probably be boring you all to death with flowers, butterflies and other such things.

End of winter = beginning of camcorder season!

There seems to be a very short period of perfect outdoor moviemaking weather in Georgia where I live. There comes that magical time when it's not cold enough to fog over the lens and still not yet hot enough to fry the electronics and circuitry in my camera, and most importantly, there comes the time when a body can go outdoors without immediately collapsing of heat exhaustion or being carried away by mosquitoes.

The time has finally arrived, and to celebrate, my husband and I "called out the posse" and had a two hour session of goalie practice down in a neighborhood parking lot. And of course, my movie camera was there too.

Since my last post here (which it seems has been a long time), I have not only become the owner of a Canon VIXIA HD camcorder, but have also acquired a tryout version of AVS video editing software to edit my HD movies.  In the past I had been using the older version of Windows Movie Maker that came with Windows XP, but since that version does not support AVCHD high-definition formats, I had to look for new software.  My first notion was to use the newer version of Movie Maker which does support  HD formats, but found that, as often is the case with Microsoft, the "new improved" version compromises many of the features that made the older version so useful.  The main difference was that there was no longer a timeline view for accurate trimming, nor a wave-style audio track bar for accurate synchrnoization of secondary audio to video.  Constrained by budget, I found the trial AVS software to fit most of my needs and it is far less likely to crash my computer than the software that came with my video camera.

For those of you out there who might be in a similar predicament and need a cheap way to get those HD movies converted to regular MP4 or MOV format, there is also a free software called Free HD Converter (for lack of a more imaginative name) that will allow you to work with your HD videos in WMM. If you take this route, be advised that Free HD Converter is a bit slow, and that when you work with HD files in WMM you have no control over aspect ratio and your final images may be a little horizontally compressed. If your subjects are a bit overweight, they may thank you, but otherwise the images will seem narrow and boxed-in like watching a widescreen movie on an old square TV set.

And in addition to new hardware and software, I have finally joined Magnatune.  It took a rather bold move on their behalf in which they embedded audio watermarks all throughout their music, a ploy which they have since rethought; but I am now a member and can use their music freely in all my non-commercial YouTube projects.  Since YT has become increasingly narrow-sighted in what they consider copyright, I like the added security of having actual written permission...and the music is really good. If you haven't been to their site yet, you should go...and maybe join.

So as I was saying before, it finally feels like winter has gone for good so we got out and played some street hockey and I made a short music montage of our two goalies.  Enjoy the movie!

October Moonrise

I am still questing for the Perfect Moonrise Photo..but it still amazes me how something so bright, so  large, and so relatively still can be that darn hard to capture.

The low clouds tonight made for a more interesting addition to my collection of Moon files.

Blogging via Flickr - a time-saving resource

gyroscope
Originally uploaded by spikepage

Since I now have both a photography blog AND a personal blog as well as my Flickr photostream, I have numerous places to show my photos, but sometimes find that I lack the time to make use of all three.

So I am trying out the "blog it" feature on Flickr. It allows me to post directly to one of my blogs any photo from my Flickr photostream.

Setting up this feature is easy. Just visit your "Your Account" page on Flickr, then click the "Sharing and Extending" tab. If you scroll down to "My Blogs", you can add target blogs to the list. Flickr will walk you through doing so, since different blogging services have different procedures for granting permissions.

Once you have set up blogging permissions, you can start sharing. Go to the "Photo Page" of whatever image you want to share and click "Share this" above the photo. You'll get a dropdown menu with several choices, one of which is "Blog this". After clicking that, you will see your list of blogs that you have permitted to post from Flickr.

That will lead you to a simple posting window with text frames for title and post. There are options for more sophisticated posting templates, but for now, this will get you started.

Unfortunately, you can only post to any single blog from this page, but if you want to repost the same text to multiple blogs (as I will be doing with this post), you should copy your text, return to the Photo Page,and repeat your steps from there, choosing a different blog, then pasting your text into the Post area.

To be quite honest, I do not even know if this will work, nor do I know how it will look if it does work.

This is only a test.

BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP

Another good photography blog

Since you OBVIOUSLY have impeccable taste in photography blogs *wink nudge*, you should also check out Weekly Photography Tips here on Blogspot.  It updates at least as regularly as the name suggests, and often more than. There you'll find all sorts of useful tips, links to DIY projects for studio equipment, links to books and other projects to help you in your hobby, not to mention contests,  reviews, and the occasional not-remotely-photography-related (but still fun to read) article.

I've updated my blog list (over in yon sidebar) and included the link there. I'll also be keeping an eye out for other good photo blogs to add to the list. If you have some suggested blog-reading, please reply the link to me and I'll check it out.

Snapshots at a baby shower

By no means am I aspiring to be a wedding photographer, but when a good neighbor asks me to take some snaphots at her sister's baby shower, I see a great opportunity to get in some much-needed practice taking candid shots of people, not to mention being able to give a unique gift to the mother-to-be. I took around 100 photos in all, but as always there were a few that just were too blurry or underexposed to save. I did a little cropping and touching up on the other 80 and made a pair of CD-ROMs, one for my neighbor the hostess and one for her sister.

It was a fun party with great food. I had my first pozole and the best tres-leches cake I have ever tasted. There was lots of people, all kinds of crazy "just for the girls" games, and kids and babies galore.

Here are a few of my personal favourites.

The camera really seems to like this little girl's eyes. And this little sweetie really seems to like having her picture taken. Most kids seem to automatically turn off the cute as soon as the camera comes into the room.

Since the house was full of women, all the men stayed outside, including my husband. The guys had a game of soccer in the front yard while the ladies had their hen-party. These two guys were funny as could be. The one on the right told the other, "Hey! She just took your picture!", and the other said it was "Because I'm a super model."

And finally, this one of the mother-to-be showing off one of her many gifts.  The baby is due in July, and has a whole army of cousins and other relations (most of whom are girls) waiting to welcome her into the world.  

The same neighbor's oldest girl is having a birthday soon, and likely another party.  Matter of fact I know several other junebugs celebrating birthdays this month..myself included.  Watch this space for more party pics.

Time Lapse fun

Today, since I had my computer going all day anyway, I decided to try out a never-before-utilized feature on the software that came with my Canon XSi camera. Among the functions in "Remote Shooting", there is a tab with a little time clock that can be used to set either a delayed shot OR a series of shots at regular intervals. The latter is customizable both with intervals between shots and how many total shots will be taken. The camera must be connected via USB to the computer with the software running, but my USB cable is pretty long...and like I said, I've been in here all day.

Here's about an hour and a half worth of boring clouds rolling past my boring window. I spruced the show up a bit with some cheesy hue effects in WMM and some really nice music who's source I am not at all ashamed to plug.

/ shamless plug /

Go to Magnatune.com and listen to all sorts of great music from many genres. Join Magnatune and download all you want for less than the cost of one top-forty CD. It's all legal..and they're not evil.

/ end shameless plug /

Placing all the individual photos into a WMM project was pretty easy. Just click the first in the series, hold down SHIFT and then click the last..and the whole batch is imported. Adjust the image duration in Tools > Options > Advanced so that each photo displays for just 1/4 of a second. Use the SHIFT key to select and drag all the images form the project pane into the timeline, then save.

You can adjust both the time-lapse intervals in the Canon software and the image duration in WMM to make a smoother video, but I was eager to get results on my first attempt.

So..here it is in all its cheesy glory.

"Dusting and cleaning" Sorting photos on my PC

After a bit of sprucing up on this blog (which I have once again sorely neglected, I decided it was time to do some much-needed hard-disk cleanup and sort through my piles of digital photos on the laptop.

I had done this in the past on our old desktop PC, but since then the poor old PC gave up the proverbial ghost and took with it to the afterlife some of my best images. I had backed up some to CD-ROM not too long before the crash, but had been lax in my backing-up routine over the last months of the old PCs life and for that paid the price. But that is that..and this is now.

The software for both of my Canon cameras gives several options for naming batches of photos when downloading from the camera, and then places them into folders based on dates-captured, but if you are like me, you sometimes take photos of a wide variety of things in a single day and perhaps even have a few themes that turn up in lots of your photos that deserve their own folder. Many of my pictures are of food, buildings, flowers, or interesting skies. I also like to keep event photos separated into their own places, so I have made what I call an indexed gallery folder.

Being the smart folks you are, I won't bore you with how to use your Mac or PC and how to create new folders. You know how to do that already. Also, this isn't a "how to do it" so much as a "how I do it", so you'll probably have your own ideas for how to sort your photos.

I began by making a new folder in my main images folder called "Sorted Galleries" that will contain all my little sub-category folders of images. I make sure to keep this folder free of unsorted images so that when I am sorting images, I just open the Sorted Gallery folder in a new window and drag-and-drop files from their original unsorted pile right into the appropriate subfolder. This tends to go a little smoother than dragging stuff around within a single crowded folder.

Then whenever I find my unsorted photos are getting a bit out of hand..like when I have more than fifty sitting loose in my Images folder, I take a few minutes and sort them. Then when I see that my Sorted Gallery is just about big enough to fill up a CD-ROM (700 MB), I just copy the whole thing to CD, clear out the folder on my hard-disk and start over.

If you have CD-making software like NTZ CD-Maker, you can even make a nifty jewel-case card with a few highlight photos and a creative title like "Pictures I took between March and June of 2010"...but you can probably do better than that. :)

Of course there will come along that one particular birthday party or football game which you take 700 MB worth of photos in a single day, in which case you'll probably want to make a single folder and CD of that one event. CDRs aren't really that expensive anymore, and hard-disk space is valuable real estate, especially if you're on an older machine or have too much photo processing software (and music, and games, and other junk) loaded onto your laptop.

So, today I have a backlog of files from last October. Yeah..I've been real slack. I expect I will end up with about 10 CD-ROMs and around 7 GB of free drive space when it's all over and done, not to mention the security that comes with knowing that two birthday parties, a Georgia snowfall, two championship ballgames and a weekend in Texas won't be lost in any hypothetical crash.

How to make a light box "on the cheap"

I've been working with miniature photography for almost seven years now, and have learned a few tricks along the way. But the most important thing I have learned is... that my hobbies are slowly putting me in the poor-house. Therefore I take every possible chance to save a penny.

Here's how to make a good light-diffusing box for closeup macro photography.

All you need is

1 20"X30" Sheet of White Foam Core Posterboard - ($2 a sheet)
3 11"X17" Sheets of Vellum Paper ($11 for 50 sheet pad)
White Duct Tape ($2 a roll)
3 Clamp Lamps ($5 each)
3 natural daylight bulbs - 60 watt (around $3 depending on longevity)
A roll of Clear Scotch Tape (you probably already have some lying around)

*prices may vary depending on where you shop*

I'm including a template for "the small version", but if you want to use two sheets of foamcore, you can double all dimensions; using one sheet to do the two side panels and the other to do the top and back panels.


I think it should be fairly self-explanatory, but basically what you will end up with is two side panels with diffuser windows which are attached to the back panel so that they fold inward. The spacer piece is used to join one of the side pieces to the back so that when folded down, the side piece will lay flat and not tear away.


To assemble, lay the back wall and one side piece down flat with their shorter sides touching. Tape them together using the white duct tape along the full length of the joined edges. Fold the side piece inward book-style and run a second piece of duct tape along the outside of the fold, much like the spine of a book.

Before attaching the opposite side piece, attach the spacer strip flat atop and along the edge of the back wall.

Use a spare bit of foamcore (one of the window cutouts) to lay under the right side diffuser so that its shorter edge lays flush against the right edge of the spacer strip attached to the back wall. Tape the edges together just like with the left side, and then fold it in and tape the outside of the fold bookbinder style.

The top piece is not attached. Once the back and sides are set up, and the side pieces are angled inward slightly, the top piece simply rests on top. Having it removable makes it easier to arrange things inside the light box. If you are unable to find or unwilling to spend that much on vellum, ordinary waxed paper or bleached parchment will do almost as well. Use the clear tape to attach the paper to the side and top panels.

You might decide you want to hang up a backdrop. One way I've found to do this easily is to use a thin strip of magnetic material fastened along the top of the back panel. Those free refrigerator magnets you get in the mail work nicely in that capacity. A second strip of magnet can then be used to quickly fasten the backdrop of your choice. I have a longer backdrop that hangs behind the subject and then curves down to cover the tabletop underneath the subject. This makes a nice smooth background without any harsh corners detracting from the image. If you like gradient backdrops, you can perform a Google-search for "printable gradient" and find loads of light-to-dark gradients to choose from.


The clamp-lamps are lightweight and cheap, and the reflectors can be removed and nested for compact storage or transport. My current bulb of choice is the GE Mini Spiral Soft White Longlife florescent. Yeah I know that sort of light is harder to white-balance, but for the trade-off, it is MUCH cooler in my studio, and these bulbs do not cause as much green-shift as you might expect. I like to use the three-lights method..two shining from either side from a slight angle inward and the third shining from the top straight down. IF YOU USE tungsten or other "hot" bulbs, do not place the lamps directly against the paper, as it might catch fire.

And when you're finished shooting, it folds down to the size of a notebook.


And here's the result...straight from the camera..no Photoshop used aside from cropping and watermarking.

These three minis are actually Reaper 'Legendary Encounters' pre-painted orc warriors.

I shoot with a Canon EOS "Rebel" XSi using the 18-55mm lens, but with the right preparation, almost any modern digital camera can get similar results.

Shutter speed - 1/10 sec
F-number - f/5.6
Focal length - 48mm
Flash - none
ISO - 100
Metering mode - spot
Shooting mode - aperture priority
Exposure compensation - o steps