S.J.Godfrey

I had the peasure of shooting the poster for Backstages upcoming Major prodcution night where they are putting on both the Real Inspector hound and Mother courage.

It was a nice simple shot with two of the actors, one from each play. From Mother Courage I had Michelle McCowage who plays the title chracter and from Hound I had Marcus Higgins (who is also in the other play) who plays Inspector Hound. The orginal image is here.

As I knew the acotrs were going to be cut out of the back graound I just wanted to make sure they stood out from the background and I did not have to worry about shadows spilling onto the backgraound either.

The finished product is here.

Here is a short little clip with some bloopers that I shot for Backstages upcoming production of Tom Stoppard's play, The Real Inspector Hound.

When I started getting interested in making my own Time Lapse movies I found it difficult to find a coherent tutorial on the web that contained all the information that I needed to get started. It is my hope that this brief introduction will fill this void. In this whole post I am assueing that you have already got the images on your hard drive and have them processed. In a later post(s) I will talk more about these two other aspects of the process.

The great thing about Time Lapse is the magic of going from these 24 images to one second of movie.

 Software

There are many different applications that you can use. Here I shall make a list of all the programs that a photographer will already have or are available for free on the internet.

One of the free options is google's Picassa, there are others but I prefer this one.

Most photographers will have access to Adobe Photoshop Lightroom (I use version 3) ,  and Photoshop (I use CS4E). Both of these programs can be used to create movies, however Lightroom is rather limited.

There are two other programs that many people use which are Quicktime pro and Adobe Primer and Final Cut. The last two are industry standards that have a lot of bells and whistles which you don't need for your basic timeplase.

 Photoshop CS4 Extended

1) Save the files in a numerical sequence i.e. filneame-1.jpg, filename-2.jpg, etc

2) File>Open and select the first file in the sequence and check the image sequence box

3) A dialog box will appear for you to enter the frame rate you will want to use. Note that if upon opening the image sequence you picked a file sequence of 2fps then later in step 4 when exporting the video you select 1fps you will only get every second image appearing in your movie.

3) You can edit the file just like any other file in photoshop but here the edits will be applied to each frame in a static way.

4) File>Export>Render video and work though that dialog box

Picassa 3.9.7.585

1) Navigate to the folder with the images

2) Click on create a new Movie Presentation

3) When you first open this you will find a title slide which can be removed.

4) Go to the movie tab and change transition style to time lapse.

5) Once you have selced time lapse you can selcted the fram rate you want to use, here I have selceted 24fps as well as the final output dimesions you want you movie to have.

6) Once every thing has been selected you can then click onto create movie and you are done.

7) Picassa's default location to store the videos that you create are in (on a mac) you>pictures>Picassa>Movies

Lightroom 3

The down side to using lightroom is that it is limited interns of the frame rate of 10fps or slower to get over this you can download a series of templates from http://lrtimelapse.com. 

1) Select the slidshow modual.

2) Select which photos you want to be inculed in the movie which you can in three ways, either selcted photos, flagged photos or all filmstrip photos.

3) Go to the preset panel and selcted the frame rate you want the output video to be from the presets that you have just downloaded (on the left of screen)

4) Then click on export to video.

Now that you have created your video it is time to share it, here is the video I created via photoshop which has been uploaded to youtube. I uploaded the movie at 720p which is not the deafual quaility for youtube videos so besure to bump up the image quality to see the movie at the highest quality.

Right now I am in the process of moving my blog that was on wordpress.com on to squarespace. The main reason for this is that I want to consolidate my web presence onto one site that containes my blog, portfolio and podcast that I am working on creating.

Right now it is a little bit of a love hate relationship with squarespace most of the hate is down to the learning curve I am on to get the site looking how I want it. This might be a gradual process as right now I am just keen to get something up and running.

Towards the end of last year I was looking for ways to improve my photography in the new year. Looking for ideas I was hitting the photo blogs and podcasts looking for ways to improve. Most of the advice out there was to  just get out there and shoot, take a class or work on a photographic project.

A photographic project is a connected set of photographs that are made with some theme or idea. It is also a step towards trying to say something more meaningful then you can with a single image. It also helps you the photographer to have something to focus on, a reason to lift the camera up to your eye and click the shutter.

So when it came time to decided on what personal project I should do, I turned to google to do some research to see what had been done. This research came up with these being the most common photographic projects

• 365 days: You make a photograph of something every day. A good place see some examples of this is the flickr group 365 days.
• 100 strangers: Over some set period of time you make 100 portraits of 100 strangers. There is actually a website for this project at 100stangers.com.
• A-Z: Go out on a photowalk and shoot the alphabet in any order, one photograph for every letter
• 52x: Similar to the 365 day project but where you do something every week, typically there is an overall theme hence the x. A great example of this is the 52 suburbs project of Louise Hawson
• Photo Essay: Telling a story though a series of images, generally in a journalistic way covering a news story or some sort of social issue. Some tips on doing an essay can be found on Digital Photography School, Part 1, Part 2

Many other ideas can be found with a simple google search but most will be some combination of the above ideas.

Notice one importing thing about all the projects above, they generally work as a body of work not a solitary image. So if you go though your archives and see that you have a lot of photographs with a similar theme that is a photographic project that you have done without even realising.

So at the start of the year I set myself some projects to work on for the year. When deciding on a project one of the important things to take into account is accessibility. Do you have easy access to your subject? This is becoming only too clear now.

So at the start of 2011 I embarked on two projects one Street photography in Sydney, the other Beaches of the Royal National Park (RNP). And I set the seminally simple goal of trying to produce one good image every month for a year. The street photography project has been going well though has slowed down due to the cool winter. The beaches of the RNP hasn't even started, as I don't drive I have a real access Issue. Hopefully I will find the time to do some hiking and camping.

I was also lucky that another project came up early in the year, to document a Theatrical society which will be coming up in the up coming proof sheets.

Not all projects need to have such a long time span, nor do they need to be plained. Just go out there and have fun shooting.