Posted by ryanjackson on May 7, 2008 in Ryan's Life
After not updating for over six months I am finally back.
I apologize to all of my regular followers for ignoring the site for so long.
In a nutshell…. On November 1st I became a staff videographer/photographer at the Edmonton Journal. I have been so focused on my job in the last six months that punkoryan.com became an afterthought. It was good to take a break from the site for a while, but now I realize that I need to take a break from work and actually focus on my own life.
Take a look through the achives to see what I’ve been up to for the last six months. You will find it is mostly video because… that is mostly what I shoot now. Video, photos, slideshows, multimedia… it’s all the same… just telling a story visually.
To make this video I mounted an old Canon 1D camera with a
Zenitar 16mm fisheye lens in the catwalk. I triggered the camera
with a
Pocketwizard MultiMax which is normally used for flashes or
remote cameras but has an interesting intervolometer feature.
I set the Pocketwizard to trigger the camera every 15-seconds.
Even with the JPEG size set to small, I still had to run back to
Rexall Place every 11-hours to swap memory cards as a 2GB CF card
would only hold about 2,500 photos.
The trick to making time lapse videos this way is to set your
camera in manual mode and meter for whatever your brightest exposure
will be. (i.e. when all the lights are on) If the ambient light gets
darker, your image will simply get darker too.
In the end I had over 15,000 images to deal with. I wrote a
Photoshop action to batch resize all the images to 400px wide (the
size of the video), then imported them all into Final Cut Pro. I set
the default image length to be 1-frame.
Each frame represents 15-seconds of real time so when the video
plays at 30-frames-per-second you are watching time pass at
450-times normal speed.
To keep the video around 5-minutes I had to cut out some boring
parts like when the ice was freezing or the lights were out.
The video really makes you appreciate the hard working staff at
Rexall Place for making the place a clean and enjoyable place to
watch hockey.
November 9, 2007
I shot some “behind the scenes” photos at the
Canadian Finals Rodeo
