“A week in the life”

I’ve been working on a project lately to capture a series of time-lapse images to capture a journey in the car. I decided some time ago that I wanted a wide-angle view out of the windscreen, but also capturing some of the side windows to capture passing traffic. After many test shots, I plumped with sitting the camera on top of the tripod on the back seat of my car, and securing the tripod with 4 elastic bungee cords. I set the camera to point down slightly and straight ahead in order to get the best view of the road. The next step was to set the camera settings. I used the Sigma 10-20mm wide open on the D300, (which I discovered to my pleasure had time-lapse functionality or interval shooting as Nikon call it I think) and set the camera to aperture priority. It took me many many attempts to get it to a point where I felt happy with what I was shooting – it’s not like you can just whip it off the tripod and look at the viewer on the camera whilst you’re driving along! So once I was satisfied with the positioning of the camera, and the resulting images, I picked what seemed like an average week, made sure that I didn’t move the tripod every time I removed the camera, and proceeded to shoot my “A week in the life”….[more] In hindsight, this was the easy bit, because next I had to get them into some kind of movie. For this my only option, I figured, as I wanted a frame rate of multiple images per second, was Windows Movie Maker (I really didn’t see the point in buying any new software for one project!). Movie Maker is quite a nifty utility for splicing together a few images, but when you throw 2,500 at it, then it kinda grinds to a halt, even on a high end machine. This made editing & tweaking the film painful, really painful. It didn’t take too long to import the sequence, but once they were in there the application became very unresponsive. Just to remove a single frame or add a transition would take around 30 seconds. This unfortunately means that the final movie isn’t quite as polished and seamless as I would have liked considering the amount of effort that went into the setup etc in the first place, but I just couldn’t sit in front of Movie Maker any longer as it had taken days to get to this point.

So with out any fanfare or pazazz, here is Fabrizio Filippini’s “A week in the life”….

This entry was posted on Friday, June 5th, 2009 at 5:21 am. It is filed under Personal Projects, Photographs, Photography and tagged with Personal Projects, video. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.