Category: Photography (Page 2 of 12)

Feeling a primal need to get out of the apartment for a couple of hours, I took advantage of a break (more or less) in the inclement weather today for a photo & video making trip up to Bethany Lake Park, a green space located under several sets of power-transmission wires.

I promised (repeatedly, ahem) that “next time” there’d be more ducks. Welp.

I need to replace Hitfilm Express as my video editing software since it’s incapable of handling the codecs I normally use or the frame rates that the slo-mo work involves. Also, its “speed ramp” capability is the opposite of functional. Everything else about this shoot was a delight, at least.

Okay, maybe not the bees, but they weren’t that much of a bother either.

Anyway: Isn’t it a shame that the Bed Bath & Beyond ducks and the Bud ducks both can’t “right” themselves reliably after a splashdown? Bob, Dot, Skelly and the racing ducks had no problems. Good on them.

Next time… I’m not sure! We’ll see what tickles my fancy when the time comes.

I now know the limits of the Lumix FZ80’s battery capacity.

Over the course of two time-lapse tests this past couple of weeks I was able to get nice, zoomed-in time-lapse cloudscapes. That’s the good news. The bad news is that the battery only lasts around three hours because you can’t tell the camera to turn off the rear display. And since you can’t bypass the battery and run off of “wall power,” you’re stuck with the limitations of the battery.

This afternoon I set up a shoot intended to run five hours and only got about three. Since the battery ran out completely, I wasn’t able to “finish” the time lapse mode shoot with the usual “make a video” step… which means I ended up with 750 individual images that were to be used in the making of a video file by the camera itself.

I did that anyway once the battery had some juice again, yes, but that file is not what I uploaded to YouTube. Instead, I told HitFilm Express to load up those 750 big juicy still frames instead. That gave me the best possible quality source material to get a 4K video result. Also, I learned how to do a title card and dissolve transitions, because why not?

I probably won’t use the Lumix to do many more of these, which is a shame because I love having the ability to zoom in to the distance, thus removing all of the signs of being in an apartment complex (neighbors’ decks & windows, our deck’s railing, etc). I still want to see if I can get slightly better results, though, so if (when?) I try again anyway, I’ll use 5 second intervals instead of the 15 second intervals used to capture the above video. Hopefully that’ll give smoother-looking cloud action with details you can track better, instead of just an impression of “clouds go brrrr” like I ended up with today. Also, as much as I love having the treeline to provide a frame of reference, “trees go brrr” is definitely an unwanted result.

Lessons learned, further experimentation and practice warranted.

Next time… damn, I keep promising more ducks, don’t I? Huh. Where’s the GoPro…?

Always Be Catching Delightful Eevees.

It’s been so long since I used the Lumix that the battery had completely drained and I had to tell it what time & date it is all over again. (Whoops.) I also had to go into “aperture priority” mode to get enough depth of field to prevent either the front Eevee or the Funko from showing up as fuzzier than they should be.

With that said, I’m glad to have taken the Lumix out of mothballs. While I really want to play with the GoPro some more, it wasn’t really a great choice for this particular shot.

Next time… more ducks…?

I went into the weekend wanting to put my new toy through some more paces. My original plan was to drop duckies into a basin of water and catch that in slo-mo on the GoPro but that was a no-go. (I’ll revisit that idea later once I’m able to figure out workable logistics.)

Instead, I found a wide and shallow box top suitable for die-rolling, set up the camera, and threw some dice to see what kind of results I could get. My first setup used natural light, since the “bouncing duckies” test runs showed that the light tent could be a bit too bright. Unfortunately the natural light wasn’t enough so the video turned out a bit grainy. Not entirely unexpected, but also completely unsuitable.

Out comes the light tent! And in goes my entire D20 pouch contents:

Which was neat and all, but what really turned out great were a couple of my D6 test shots, one of which I kept & posted:

It’s wild just watching those last couple of dice turn… and turn… and turn… and finally settle. This is what I came here for, yes indeed. And now I have a fairly good idea just how slow I can go. I started with 240 frames per second and took that down to 23.97 in the converter. (Speed-ramping tricks are for another day. And, yes, the second video could really use it. I know.)

Next time… the previously-promised duckies, I hope!

I’m absolutely digging this GoPro HERO9. I did another session outside, because I cannot get enough of watching clouds go ‘vroom’.

I also wanted to play a bit with slow-motion video, and this afternoon I got that chance. I put together the light tent (as all advice I’ve read about doing 240fps video emphasized the need for good lighting), I gathered some handy duckies, Vyx had the bright idea of putting cling-wrap onto a small mixing bowl, and I found a pillow with a nice bit of “bounce” to it. The results are… modestly amusing:

My original plan was to do “speed ramping” in Hitfilm Express, but I learned today that the software is kind of… actually terrible at that. (Speed ramping is that moderately-overused “things are going fast then they slllloooooowwww doooooowwwnn and then go fast again” visual effect you see in a lot of action shows/movies lately.) So I just loaded up VirtualDub and said “yeah, take this 240fps thing and make it 30fps for me” and here we are.

Look, if nothing else I’ve found a fun new thing to do with duckies. Can’t go wrong, there.