Friday, March 5, 2010

Some Photos (sort of)

I keep meaning to write a post. Whenever I go riding I ride along writing it in my head, but I never get around to it, or when I do I've forgotten what I was going to write.
(Do all my posts start like this?)

I haven't taken any photos in ages. I went out to take photos along the Trans Canada Trail a couple of weeks ago to take photos. I was out for about five hours, but only got around to processing these two:




I was still itching to try the time-lapse thing, but after breaking the first and having the second one stolen, I decided not to go with the cheap Canon point-and-shoot, asnd instead get an intervalometer for my D90. It arrived two days ago (this was written over a week before it got finished and posted, we've had nothing but flat cloud cover and rain since), and I've been messing around with it at home, and once I've got it down I'll go and find some more interesting scenes (top of Prevost, Tzouhalem, Mill Bay, etc. Any more ideas?).





There are so many thing to get right though. With stills, I take a picture, look at it on the LCD, and fix whatever's wrong. With a time lapse sequence though, everything has to be planned for several hours (or, if I can figure out an external power source, days). Predicting what exposure settings you'll need in two hours means predicting the weather. In the crocus one, the clouds shifted and the resulting video is over exposed. Although I remembered to set the white balance to manual, it isn't quite right. With a still, this would take two seconds to fix in Adobe Camera Raw, but quite a bit longer with thousands of stills to process, even with batch processing (does anyone have any recommendations for batch processing software? Lightroom?).
And then there's the problem of how often to take a shot, which is just guess work really.

I think I'm going to have to make a checklist.
exposure
white balance
manual focus
jpeg (not RAW)
jpeg size and quality
turn LCD off
lens flare?
will lens steam up?
shadows (tripod/camera in shot?)
rain?

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