I had a plan to meet up with my friend Joel to catch up recently.  We were looking for a place to meet and went with the Holiday Inn by the Merchandize Mart.  It has a bar that is a comfortable place to talk and has the added benefit of a great view over the city.  I wasn’t there to shoot anything but, knowing the view was good, I took along some gear just in case.

Joel and I chatted for ages and didn’t get around to taking pictures for a while.  As the sun was setting, the sky was getting very interesting and I finally had to apologize and grab the camera.  I got a few shots and then set it up by the window next to me to shoot a time lapse.

This required no input from me so we could continue to talk without interruption but it should provide something interesting to check out later.  However, I hadn’t planned as well as I hoped.  As the light dropped, the shutter speeds were getting perilously close to the delay between each shot as I had set the ISO a little lower than I thought.  Changing it is not a problem but I was using a lighter tripod which was not as well locked off as I thought.  I managed to move the head a little.  I corrected but knew the alignment would be off a bit.

Fortunately, while I couldn’t completely remove the effect, when I processed the time lapse using Lightroom and LRTimelapse, I was able to find the frames where the jump takes place, set them as keyframes, adjust the cropping of the second of those two frames to almost perfectly align and the resulting video is a lot better than it would have been.

Thanks Joel for a fun time.  It was good to catch up and I appreciate the stuff you gave me.  Here is the video that resulted!