Life in optical

Playing in the waves from carolune on Vimeo.

Music: Dvorak: Slavonic Dances op.46 played by Breemer & Vorontsova from pianosociety.com

Those of you who know me – or have seen me use my beloved camera – know that I shoot it like a machine gun. Given that it peaks at something like 6 images per second, it makes for a funny timelapse kind of thing when looking back.

Usually I select the best shot of the series to make my one photo of the moment or subject. That makes for a lot of wasted memory space, which doesn’t matter at all in this wonderful world of digital photography :)

Sometimes however, it’s hard to chose the best one – and when it’s something very dynamic I’m shooting, I just wish I could make a timelapse of it all. I am a huge fan of timelapse photography but I have never put together a video of timelapse myself. I wouldn’t know where to start. I don’t know if there’s a specific piece of software that’s required.

Anyway. Tonight I tried, and…. success! I’ve made a cool timelapse photography movie of some awesome waves on the Atlantic coast of South Africa. I didn’t take the photos with a timelapse in mind so apologies if it’s not at all stable or anything. I guess it could be seen as a very old movie or something?

This place is one of my favourite spots, It’s not easy to reach, you have to climb through a few rocks but it’s always worth it. It is spectacular to witness the waves break on those rocks. At sunset it’s a delight. You’ll see during the film that my lens got happily sprayed. Oops. Fellow photographers agree or not – but my gear has to survive my lifestyle and when I get the waves, the waves get me and my camera too…

I hope you enjoy the video. It’s a first and I’m hugely excited about it – now that I have unlocked timelapse photography, I’m going to have so much fun!

Waves from carolune on Vimeo.

Waves at sunset in Llandudno, South Africa. Timelapse photography. Music: Valse nonchalante, Camille Saint-Saëns played by Chris Bremer, pianosociety.com.

For the sake of other timelapse wannatries out there, here is how I made it :)

1: import the timelapse photos into iPhoto
2: create a new project in iMove
3: import the previously imported photos as media for the movie
4: select all frames (the default is that each second is displayed for 4 seconds with a Ken Burns effect, this is not what we want)
5: click on the settings of the media in the iMovie project.
6: set the duration of each photo to 0.01 seconds (that’s the shortest iMovie will allow)
7: remove the Ken Burns effect!
8: find some cool music to put on top of your timelapse series. To not be in trouble about copyrights and other legal issues, I usually use classiccat.com or pianosociety.com, both are treasure-troves of recorded classical music
9: add text, title, scomments, effect, whatever you like to do in iMove
9: export the whole thing into a nice format
10: upload to your youtube, dailymotion, vimeo, etc. account and share! :)

Please leave me a comment if you have a suggestion on how to improve on this. Thanks :)