Sunday, August 09, 2009

Timelapse experiment 1

While charging around one night, head fizzing with picture and timelapse ideas, I stood in a shadow and broke a bone in my foot. This has put a damper on any timelapse experiments- and thrown the standard daily round here into a strange perspective.
Hobbling about, and limited to a 16Mb card on the camera, the first few attempts at timelapse have been fun, anyway.

5 comments:

Giovanni Tiso said...

A timelapse project of sorts, not to mention just about the coolest thing I've ever seen: http://fima-psuchopadt.livejournal.com/2564781.html

I am a really bad photographer, but I do enjoy my walks and there's this particular street nearby I probably climb two hundred or so times a year. I have this funny idea to find myself a spot there and take a picture of the harbour view every time I go, then string them all together in a short (very short) film. It wouldn't work unless I have a really fixed spot of some sort, would it? I don't have a tripod, I'd always be taking each picture just placing the camera in front of my face. What do you think?

rob said...

Very beautiful- and affecting- set of photos. I wish I could read the text- google translation does a reasonable hackery in this instance ("Every day we go on to the streets, dying at his defenders who thought about us. About Us, which he was not destined to see. But we can remember! ")
You are right- for timelapse to be effective, most of the picture- the 'bones'- needs to be motionless. It's the contrast of fixed and changing which gives impact.
But you could do something like it- using the same camera, the same zoom of the same lens, and finding a spot- preferably a fixed spot, on a wall, say. Use an element you can line up the same, on both horizontal and vertical planes. For the result, it might be best to dissolve between each shot, holding each for maybe a second or so. I've seen very impressive footage of a building going up done like this.

Giovanni Tiso said...

I'll scout for a suitable spot, unfortunately the fixed elements are mostly vegetation, so they will grow!

But here's another idea I have which could very loosely fall under the rubric of timelapse photography. Suppose you had a lot of pictures taken over the course of many years and from different angles of the living room of your family house. Do you know if there is software out there that could help you to suture them together, as it were, twist the perspective of each so that they all fit according to a common vanishing point? I realise of course the end result wouldn't look at all realistic, but I'm tickled by the idea.

rob said...

I'm fairly sure there is- but I haven't played about with any. The Canon A460 (which is a terrific camera for the price) came with something called 'photostitch'. It's designed to do this job- but 'seamlessly'- not with cubist style.
However a quick google of "free photostitch' brings up quite a few possibilities. With the addition of 'cubist', there was this intrigiung possibility: "PhotoFit is a high performance panoramic photo stitching software which comes .... Additional features include Cubist Facet Smoother, De-Dadaizer"
Photofit do offer a free trial version- http://www.photofit4panorama.com/downloads.html that looks like it's not time-limited. Probably doesn't have all the options, though. And who couldn't find a dozen daily uses for a "de-dadaizer" - taking the "ab"s out of the absurdity of life.

Giovanni Tiso said...

Great, thank you Rob - I really wouldn't have known where to begin looking for that.