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My name is Veeti Paananen. I live in Finland, and I write desktop and web applications using technologies such as Qt and Ruby on Rails. This is my personal website and blog. Close this...
New theme
February 26th, 2009
I haven’t posted for a while.
I’ve been working on a new theme for the blog, built with the 960 Grid System, which is a really helpful utility for non-webdesigners like me. Hacked it into a WP theme by editing Kubrick (the default theme).
So, here it is. Yay.
No Comments » Time lapse photography
February 1st, 2009
Ever since “taking up photography as a hobby”, I’ve been interested in time lapse photography. As you probably already know, the idea is to take a picture every few seconds and glue them together to make a video.
Today, I decided to try it out with my new DSLR, the Canon EOS 450D… nothing special:
Here’s more on how I made this video. My plan from the beginning was to recreate another “melting ice” video I made with a Canon Point and Shoot camera last year. More on that later.
In any case, I obviously needed something to remote control the camera. I initially planned to use the EOS Utility, but after it refused to run on the laptop I was using, I downloaded a trial version of DSLR Remote Pro.
(Why can’t intervalometer functionality be built in to the camera…?)
I set up the scene and set the program to take a picture every 15 seconds – I think I should have taken one at least every 10 seconds, but it did the job fairly well. The camera was set to take the lowest quality pictures (which still reached a resolution of 2256×1504).
I copied the pictures to my computer and used some program to crop the pictures to 1920×1080 (1080p, full HD). I don’t remember what, exactly. This is what the pictures looked like then:
A bit boring...
Doesn’t look too fancy, does it? That’s when I realized I could use Adobe Photoshop Lightroom to adjust their colors & much more.
In short, Lightroom is designed for post-production work. Color adjustment and much more for photographers. I use it to manage my photography and for post-production work.
I loaded every photo into Lightroom and applied this preset to every single photo (not by hand, obviously!)
This was perfect. The preset is designed to highlight the red colour:
Much better, isn't it?
In fact, the photos got a complete makeover.
After this, I used VirtualDub to make an AVI video off the photos. I loaded it to Premiere, added some titles and fancy Creative Commons music.
And we’re done. Oh, and here’s that old video:
(snorrrt)