Category Archives: video

Super Moon (?)

A lot has been made of super moon events recently. While they have garnered a lot of attention, in truth the moon has been only fractionally larger than normal. Catching the moon low to the horizon will magnify it far more than the small change in distance manages. However, I am a sucker for a moon shot so I decided to try and find some high ground nearby to see this thing come up.

What I hadn’t counted on was the residual heat from the day. I stacked up the 500mm with a 1.4x teleconvertor on the tripod and awaited the arrival of the moon. It started to rise up and I really liked the view with the grass of the hillside ahead of me shadowing it as it rose. However, it was clear from looking through the viewfinder that the heat haze was a big problem. I got a few shots but they are not the clearest I have ever managed with the detail being heavily impacted by the shimmer in the atmosphere.

I did shoot a bit of video as well. The reason for the video was that I wanted to show the gentle wisps of cloud that drifted across the face of the moon as it rose. With the long lens combination, the moon actually moves quite quickly across the frame. I thought this looked pretty interesting. What I hadn’t appreciated at the time was that the video also dramatically illustrates the heat haze. Therefore, below is some footage of the moon at various stages of its progression supported by the sound of crickets on the hillside.

Oakland Airport BART Connector

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Until this weekend, the connection between BART’s Coliseum Station and Oakland Airport was a bus service called AirBART. It was $3 and was reasonably frequent and didn’t take too long provided you times it well. However, it wasn’t the easiest connection. Consequently, a rail connection has been built. I won’t get into the doubling of price for the ride. That can wait to another day. However, Friday 21st was the day in which the commissioning ended and the first public access was given. There were free rides for the public before formal service opened on the following day.

I went along to check out the system. It is a cable operated vehicle which runs automatically. There is a station connected by escalators to the existing BART station at one end and the other end is in the parking lot at the airport. Halfway along the track (which is elevated for a large portion of the journey and at ground level or underground for a section) is the maintenance facility and power source. Here the train briefly stops as it changes from the cable for one half to the cable for the other. The stop is quite brief.

I filmed the operation during the demonstration runs and you can see how the system looks below. Now we shall see how much use it gets!

Red Flag Night Launch

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This is an example of what worked and what might have been. After night fell at Red Flag, we headed up to the far end of the base where you are looking down towards the runways and the city of Las Vegas is in the background. Here the jets are departing over your head for the night mission. Most of them are sufficiently high and fast to cancel afterburner before they reach you. However, the B-1s stay in burner for a lot longer. Getting a shot of them in the dark – or more accurately, a shot of their engine exhausts – was the aim o the game.

They really look very cool as they blast off the runway and head towards you. It is pretty dark so you have the lenses wide open and the ISO cranked up very high. Even then, the shutter speed is low so it is a bit hit or miss. I did get a few that came out pretty nicely. Meanwhile, I had been trying to get a series of shots with a second camera to make into a time-lapse. Unfortunately, I hadn’t brought a cable release with me. I was trying to bodge together something to keep the shutter depressed. It would work for a while and then I would have to try again. The result of this is that I was progressively moving the camera. No tripod for this effort. It was resting on the roof of the car! The resulting time lapse is shorter than I would like and obviously not very good but I include it below just so you can see what I was trying for. Another time perhaps. Meanwhile, the following week, Chris went back and had a better planned go. I think his results were far better.

http://youtu.be/UVP8Py1gnZw

Elephant Seals

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Earlier in the year, I took a trip to Ano Nuevo State Park to photograph the elephant seals. This was a photo tour early in the morning in the middle of the mating season and you can read more about it here. Nancy and I decided to make a second trip out there more recently. This was a normal day at the park but there were plenty of males back on the beaches including both immature ones and some of the larger guys.

Most of the action was taking place on the beach furthest from the center. While a few seals were dozing on the beaches closer in, a lot had gathered to play. They were sparring both on the beach and in the water. Initially, it looked as if they were fighting but, as you watched further, it became clear that they were really going through the motions. Having seen the real fights, there was none of the true violence in these encounters. Moreover, one of the docents pointed out that males of very different stature were sparring with each other. The large males would never even bother to engage the smaller males if it were for real. However, in this environment, they were all just getting some practice in.

Out in the bay is an island that is no longer occupied by humans. I made a panorama of it but I was hoping to see some of the wildlife that is out there. At that time of year, Steller sea lions were out on the island. Sadly, they rarely come ashore but the males of this species are absolutely huge. We could actually see the outline of some of them out on the island. They looked like huge boulders but then you could make out their shape. Quite an impressive creature! I also shot some video while I was there and you can see the result of that below.

Adobe Camera Raw and Video

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Regular readers will be familiar with my gradual experimentation with video and video editing. In the early days of my playing with video, I discovered just how sensitive video is to exposure errors. The sort of thing that could be easily corrected in post on a raw still file were not so easily dealt with in video that was already compressed when it came out of the camera. Avoiding over exposure was one thing to do which is slightly different to shooting aircraft against a bright sky when having enough shadow detail on the aircraft is important and the sky can be recovered a bit to give a more pleasing outcome. For video this doesn’t work as well but having less shadow detail doesn’t seem to matter with motion as much as it does for stills.

Another change I made was to go with a development profile in the camera that is a lot “flatter”. This was something I read about on various blogs in that it gives the editor more to work with when grading the video later. This is certainly true but it means you definitely have to do some work in post to get the image back to something more pleasing.

I never cared for the editing tools in my old video editing application since they were weak and not as intuitive as what I was used to in Photoshop/Lightroom. Consequently, I embraced video editing in Photoshop when it became a better developed feature. However, I hadn’t found it as easy as I had hoped to get the right effect using levels and curves adjustments. Then it struck me (why it took so long when everyone else must have been doing this) that Camera Raw is the tool that combines all the things I need to enhance the video output.

I have now been using it on a couple of projects and I have to say it works very well. You have to convert the layer to a smart object first and then apply Camera Raw as a filter. If you don’t convert it, the filter only applies to the frame you are looking at and that is no use. However, one lesson I have learned is to work out the other parts of your edit first and leave this step to last. The rendering of the video with the filters applied is a huge amount slower. Short videos that would previously have rendered out in a minute or two may now take over an hour. This also applies to running through the video to make your edits. The real time rendering is lost. I suppose that you will be using a proper video editing suite if you do this on a daily basis so the use of Photoshop is moving away from its core role. However, it suits me to do so. Therefore, make all of the edits you need first and when you are happy with the final composition, convert to smart objects and filter away. Just remember that the conversion gets rid of transitions so those will have to be put back in again but that doesn’t cause me any problems. Then hit render and go and do something else. While Photoshop will do many things in the background, video rendering takes it over and you can’t work on another project while it works in the background so go off and write a blog post. That’s what I am doing right now!

SFO Night Approach Time Lapse

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Many moons ago (pun intended), my buddy Paul was visiting and we decided to have a go at night light trails at SFO. However, we had not come well equipped so headed to Best Buy to pick up cheap tripods. They were very cheap and performed as might be expected. However, with Paul coming back, we decided to have a second go at this and to prepare properly this time. We also scoped out some locations that might be suitable to get good angles on SFO.

Two things conspired against us this time. First, SFO is having runway upgrades installed so the pair of 28 runways are the only ones in use. This cuts down on the possible angles for a while. Second, the great weather forecast turned out to include some low cloud over the location we had scouted out. The aircraft rapidly disappeared from view as they climbed. (It later turned out that they were still in the clear but above the thin layer of cloud which we were under.)

We went with a plan B and found a location along the lake-shore that would provide an alternative. It was not as good but it did work. I had actually brought a spare tripod in case Paul didn’t have his so I set up two cameras. One was running long exposures that I intended to blend together to get light trails. The other I point out onto the approach which was quite busy at that point and take a lot of shorter exposures for creating a time lapse. The blend is above and the time lapse video is below. Let’s hope for better weather next time. I shall also remember that warm weather does not include after sunset and bring something a bit ticker to wear!

Circus Performers

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In some of my previous posts I have shown the interior of the building in Oakland in which I work. It is a pretty cool space (unlike our office) and this does make it popular for events. Often we shall be in the office while the event people are setting up outside. Usually that just involves a small stage, tables and chairs and a sound system. However, a few weeks ago we had something a bit more unusual. There was going to be a performance by some acrobats as part of the evening. They were getting their rigging set up and running through some rehearsals. I grabbed some video while they were doing this and below is a sample of what they were doing. Pretty cool stuff and I imagine the attendees at the event enjoyed the full performance. Another guy was doing some amazing stuff spinning a large cube frame around his body but I sadly didn’t catch that on camera.

Cuttlefish

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My sister and nephew came to stay with us so we had a chance to do a few touristy things. This included another trip for me to the aquarium at Monterey. Since I have been a couple of times recently, this time I didn’t take along my camera since I thought I would enjoy traveling light and just looking at the creatures in the collection. However, I did have my phone and couldn’t resist a few photo opportunities. Specifically, we saw a cuttlefish exhibit that I seem to have missed on my previous visits.

Cuttlefish are fascinating creatures to me. The aerodynamicist in me loves their use of their control surfaces to move in any direction with supreme control. Plus, they look as much like an alien as anything out there and change color at will. I was fascinated by them and one of them seemed to be quite taken with me as it moved face to face with me and waved its tentacles at me. Not sure if this was friendly or threatening but, with some thick glass between us, I wasn’t too bothered. We probably won’t be back there too soon but when we next go, I shall be sure to pay them another visit.

LRTimelapse

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I have previously written about some time-lapse software that I use based on a recommendation from my friend Jo Hunter. I used this software for a while before the creator, Gunther Wegner, updated it to a new version and deactivated the version I had. I was a bit miffed by this but I was able to continue using the export settings from his application within Lightroom but with me having to manually manage the file cropping. All transition and smoothing capability was lost but I could still make a basic time-lapse.

Sadly, the latest versions of Lightroom have done away with that as well and now I couldn’t even render the video. Therefore, I decided to take a look at the latest version of his software. It is now on version 3 so I have skipped a version en route to this place. I had shot a few sequences recently and wanted to be able to manage them properly so decided to come back and have another go with his application.

There have been some improvements in tidying up the software so the workflow is a bit better. There is still a certain amount of effort as you switch back and forth with Lightroom. You have to put all of the images into a single folder while working on them. This means a modification to my storage strategy but it isn’t difficult to manage in Lightroom and, when you are done, you can revert the images to their original locations and still render the video output. It might be nicer if he gave you a more flexible approach to selecting files but this is not a hardship.

It has changed a little from what I am used to since now it starts out analyzing the files before you have created keyframes. Once this is done, you save the xmp files out and reload them in Lightroom. Define your keyframes and make any edits to them that you want and save xmp again. Back to LRTimelpase to load the changes and now it does its smoothing very quickly. Save xmp again and back to Lightroom and now there is an Export setting along with all of the other export options. No going to the Slideshow module any more.

The results are pretty good. The new export functionality actually generates a sequence of still images which it stores. You then head back into LRTimelapse where you have a series of options for rendering a video sequence from those stills. You can have it automatically delete the stills when it is done or keep them and render again using different output options. This is pretty flexible although it means you have to pay attention to what you have used so you don’t end up with a ton of stored intermediate images. The video output looks good. I am not using the product commercially so do not have the full commercial license. That will allow output in 4K formats. I only wanted 1080p HD format for my purposes. It is a little interesting that 4K is automatically assumed to be commercial use. With people able to record 4K on GoPros these days and 4K TVs showing up, I suspect this is going to be a more mainstream format before too long. Maybe it will be in the personal use license of future versions of LRTimelapse. We shall see.

Was it worth the upgrade? Yes. Not least because I wanted to have the capability back that I had lost when Lightroom changed its output but, even so, I have found the new version to be quite a bit more friendly to work with. I think it will encourage me to work on a few more projects.

Video of Reno

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It has been a long time since the National Championship Air Races took place at Reno. I wrote about them here and my feature for Global Aviation Resource ran a while back. However, as with the previous year, I did shoot some video while I was there. I actually edited it quite a while back but I had not got around to adding any music. Various distractions meant it was a while before I did. However, the music is now included so here is the video.