http://www.vimeo.com/9996748

This is a video I made while out taking photos this evening.  The original duration was about 14 minutes and was sped up by 3,000% to a final duration of just under 30 seconds.  It was filmed with my canon 5D Mark II and Sigma 1.4 50mm and post processing was done in Adobe Premiere Pro CS3.

In this shot are the 10th Avenue Bridge, Interstate 35W (Blue) and the Stone Arch Bridge.

http://www.vimeo.com/9913073

This video was shot between 10:30PM and 1:30AM starting on 3/3/2010 from the Minneapolis Grain Exchanging looking east. Shots were taken at 10 second intervals and the final playback speed is 30fps.  A Sigma 50mm 1:1.4 was used at about f/2.8 allowing for 1/40th second exposures.  The frames were rendered in to a high quality H264 video and uploaded to Vimeo.

I love taking photographs at night in the winter. I don’t the the process as much as the results. The cold dry air yields incredibly sharp results and when it is really cold out, the water vapor form building leaves a thick lingering streak in the sky. The video below was filmed on January 3rd using a Sigma 50mm 1.4 and a Canon 5D Mark II.

http://www.vimeo.com/8528240

As far as the video capture goes, I opted to film a 30 FPS and speed up the video in Premiere. (The other method is to use an intervalometer and combine the photos in post.)  This method works great when the source footage is short (less than 10 minutes long) and generally gives smoother results.  The only downside is that you generate significantly more footage than you will use and it takes a long time to process in post.  All of the source clips in this film are played at 5x to 50x their real time speed.

If you are interested in using the source footage, you may be able to find it on iStockPhoto or you may contact me directly.

Last night I was experimenting with an old laptop hard drive.  I used a USB to PATA hard drive adaptor to recover old data off of a 2.5 inch 20GB Toshiba hard drive.  When I was done, I intended to destroy the drive to prevent recovery.  After a few seconds – I had a better idea:

Macro Photo of a 2.5 Inch Hard Drive

I disassembled the drive and I simply wanted to take a photo of the hard drive internals.  I was surprised that the drive spun up with the cover removed- and was completely shocked that it still worked without errors.  I managed to keep it working for several hours without fail while I took a few photos and more importantly video.  I used the same reverse lens mount and cheap Canon EF 35-80 1:4 as in my previous macro experiments.  See the results below:

http://www.vimeo.com/7931176

If you are interested in using the source footage, you may be able to find it on iStockPhoto or you may contact me directly.

I’ve been experimenting with a cheap macro contraption.  Generally, a dedicated macro lens works best.  Next up is a screw-on filter style.  After that is mounting two lenses end-to-end and lastly is my solution: just putting the lens on backwards.  A mounted my Canon 35-80 1:4 on backwards and it worked…shockingly.  The image is nearly impossible to control as the subject practically needs to be touching the lens and something like the 500D (linked above) would be much more practical, but this was a fun experiment.

Check out a few more images and a video of a $20 close up after the jump.

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Gallery and video after the break

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Last night I created a time lapse of Gold Medal Park between about 9PM and 11PM.  I used a Canon 5D Mark II and the Canon EOS Utilities software to control the interval exposures.  In the clips below, exposures were set at 5 second intervals and the final frame rate was 30FPS.   So, 1 second of footage  represents 2 minutes 30 seconds.

http://www.vimeo.com/7490532

Lessons learned:

Even a small breeze can make shooting a time lapse a headache.  The jitter in the frame was caused from the wind.  I tried using After Effects to stabilize the motion but the nature of the frame make this difficult.  I’ve successfully used this method on bright daylight videos but I couldn’t get a good tracking on most of this footage.

Second, all of the frames were 21 megapixel JPEG images.  The average file size was about 7MB per frame which meant that After Effects did not like processing them.  It worked – but slowly.  To speed up the process, I used QuickTime Pro to import the frames, scale them down to 3000 x 2000 pixels and compress it as an Apple Intermediate Codec file.  This seemed to speed up the process quite a bit.

Lastly, use manual mode.  The camera will automatically adjust exposure for each frame which will cause a subtle but noticeable flicker in the image.  What I did to resolve this was to take a few test shots to measure the exposure.  Once I found a set of values I liked, I switched to manual mode and started the capture.

This is a video I produced on 10/31/2009.  It was a dreary fall afternoon and I wanted to capture the blah-feeling of the day.  Watch it here or head on over to Vimeo to add it to a group, comment, etc.. Most of the clips that are in this video will be available for purchase from iStockphoto.com It generally takes 1~2 months from the time I submit footage until it is published on their site but things seem to be speeding up.

http://www.vimeo.com/7377284

The total duration of this film is about 2:30.  I have removed the music that was originally in the video so it is currently MOS.  If you know of any Creative Commons songs that would work, please let me know!

A video I shot of a steam plant across the street from the Metrodome in Minneapolis, MN.  Taken during a foggy night in late October.  In the background are the Wells Fargo building and 225 South 6th A.K.A. the Capella building.

A time lapse of the traffic leaving the Metrodome after the Vikings / Green Bay game.

update: switched to Vimeo links