This last week I have been obsessed with looking at the sky, looking at weather forecasts and heading out into dark fields.
As mentioned in a previous post, I have engulfed myself in time lapse photography. It has become a hug passion of mine in a very short time, every spare moment I have I want to be out with my camera setting up a time-lapse, every cloud formation I see I wish I had my camera on me.
With the weather picking up in the last week I decided it was the perfect opportunity to get out and practice time lapse photography. I have always been mesmerised by star time lapse photography, watching amazing videos from people that have shot in the desert in California etc here in the UK I had to find a very dark area with little light pollution to be able to get even close to what these guys in the USA were doing. I knew thats was going to be very hard to achieve! Luckily I live out in the countryside and knew of some fairly dark areas… I headed out with my close friend Andy Howard who is also a keen photographer and time lapse shooter to a fairly dark area near where I live… over 3 nights we had disappointment and great achievements! In only 3 nights a lot was learned about this craft and how hard it was.
Time lapse is a game of patience, careful planning and luck! Even more so in night time lapses as you can spend several hours out in the middle of nowhere only to find that the images haven’t come out the way you had planned (this definitely happened to us, when we didn’t anticipate the drop in temperature and our lenses misted up!) but at the same time when you go back to your camera after a couple of hours of shooting and perform what me and Andy now like to call “The Magic Scroll” where you stop the time lapse recording and scroll through your images to check if the time lapse worked or not and it has, its just such a great feeling!
I will just backtrack a little bit and for anyone that doesn’t know how time lapse works I will do a very brief explanation as there are many great explanations online if you just Google it… however time lapse is where you take your DSLR camera and take a series of still pictures over a pre determined time at regular intervals (for example around 250 pictures can give you around 10 seconds of footage) this however at night can take up to 2 hours to get just 10 seconds of footage and thats hoping it came out well. Once back in the warm you put all your still images into a movie sequence and edit them to make a moving image.
So film 15 is more of a little teaser of what I hope to get up to over the summer… the video maybe only around 1 minute long but has taken about 10 hours to make! Once I have more free time and less full time work I hope to make a lot more longer pieces and learn this craft the best I can.
Our country, planet and skies are truly awe inspiring…
Here is Film 15, Enjoy….
Mark
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Film 15 – Nightscapes from Absolution Films on Vimeo.