Time Lapse photography

Time-lapse photography is a cinematography technique whereby the frequency at which film frames are captured (the frame rate) is much lower than that which will be used to play the sequence back. When replayed at normal speed, time appears to be moving faster and thus lapsing. (quoted from time lapse photography wikipedia). Basically it's fast forwarding time by taking lots and lots of frames at a fixed time interval and then playing it back at a movie frame rate so the viewer sees it as a fast forwarding effect. 

In order to do this what I realise is that you need lots and lots of dynamic movements or actions in your frame (otherwise it'll become dull and boring for your viewer). Also it takes a lot of patience and time to spare as you need at least an hour or two to just create a 10 seconds worth of clip so get what I mean, :).

Ok, lets stop the chit chat here and will show the links on how I learnt these technique. 

The first video shows you on how to capture the frames

The second video shows you how to put them together into a movie frame.

 and I will show my time-lapse photography taken at my university. The dynamic movements that I tried to capture here are :
1. The sun setting
2. The movement of people
3. The lights of the building 
4. The movements of the cloud
I have four dynamic elements here which if you could have more the better, that's what I think of it. Here is my result. Enjoy2.

Which Camera? Any will do

Sorry guys for all the longggg break without any post. In this post I will share a little bit of what goes inside my mind while taking my pictures. Has anyone ever heard of people asking "WHICH CAMERA IS BEST FOR TAKING PICTURES?", well the answer to that is not simple - basically for me it's the one that is with you when the right moment comes. Here are a few snaps that I took with my mobile phone with their thoughts while shooting them. Enjoy2.

An interesting image that I've managed to get  at Pitt st mall. He seems to be a very skillful guitarist. I only had my mobile phone with me and to get a picture of him I needed to be pretty close (no zoom in my mobile phone) so that's what I did, I went to him with my camera phone and while he was playing suddenly he realised that I was pretty close to him and he turned his head looked towards me (maybe thinking of WHAT IS THIS GUY TRYING TO DO!???) and that was when I snapped him, ;). Quite cool as I've managed to set my shutter speed in a way to get his hand blurry showing that he was strumming his guitar, :)) (this is completely rubbish as you can't set anything using camera phone), ;). The light was pretty good as well as it was somewhat cloudy that day. This image is postprocessed using photoshop express : cropped (to frame it), sharpened, contrast boost, desaturate and soft focus.

Shoot the Photographer : Kaveh Fanian

A little while ago (long time ago actually), I got to hang out with my best photography buddy Kaveh Fanian, a landscape and nature photographer. I've known Kaveh from his uni days (he has graduated and leaving me behind). Kaveh was doing his usual inspirational landscape shooting which does best. He decided to capture the beauty of Watson Bay which is one of the famous tourist places in Sydney.

Point of Interest

After shooting my BMW die cast toy car for the last couple of weeks (the post can be found here and here), I decided that I should start shooting something else. Again, flickr has become my source of inspiration. I started to browse through flickr to find what image should I take. Inspired by one of the picture I found, I decided to shoot something from my daily use.. Spoon and fork.

I always love the idea on how normal simple stuff like spoon and fork becomes very interesting photograph if you compose and lit it correctly. That's why I'm so excited to start this 'project'. I started by arranging my spoon and fork so that it would look nice. After a few try, I decided that I will cross the spoon and the fork together.

Still using my Nikon D40 camera and a Nikon SB-20 as my light source, I lit the spoon and fork using a bare flash. The result? Not good. Since spoon and fork are very reflective, I got a hot spot on one part of the spoon while the rest are dark. I need more diffused light. That's when I decide to make a light box.

Try to do a MacGyver, if you don't have something then try to create one!

What if you don't have something that you need? Well then either you could buy it or you could make it yourself. A few months ago, I was about to list my lens to sell it on ebay and needed to get several snaps of it for the ads. I could simply go out and buy a $80 lightbox but then again I thought I would rather spend it on something else so it is the MIY (make it yourself) solution. One would ask why would you need a lightbox in the first place. Well as we all know that if we could make it as attractive as possible. then the item would sell at a higher price That is why you see people use decorations in shops and all sort of other elements to attract buyers. Well it's the same case here, by using a lightbox you are basically creating a nicer lighting and cleaner  background larger. The lightings are improved when the lightbox is used when compared to  using a bare bulb as the larger diffusion materials creates a larger lightsource which in turns softens the light (see strobist.blogspot.com to know more about lightings).  To put it simple, basically I am trying to imitate the how the PROS shoot their products for ads. To create the lightbox, I need to find a frame which can hold my diffusion materials, so basically searched and found an unused box which I could use as a frame to attach my diffusion materials, then I started cutting a few of the sides off. Then, I went to the kitchen to find baking paper to be used for diffusion materials. The baking paper were glued to the sides of the box. As I've got only two lights at that time, I covered one side using aluminium foil with the intention of it acting as a reflector.  Furthermore, I went and bought a $1.50 white cardboard to be used as my backdrop. My finished lightbox is shown above. I know it is not pretty, but then again it'll do the job, :).