burnt embers

Another timelapse series from Trafalgar Park in Oak Bay. Today’s view is through a moderately wide-angle lens looking west from Gonzales Hill in Victoria. In foreground is Gonzales Bay, Ross Bay in the middle and  the Strait of Juan de Fuca just off the mouth of Victoria Harbour. In the distance are the Sooke Hills.  It was a windy day and my camera, and self, were buffeted pretty heavily. In fact, the video I did with the 200mm lens has the wind shaken judders magnified to a distracting level. My other timelapse videos can be found here.

To view the video click on the image below. I find that viewing it at high-resolution in WordPress runs a bit rough and recommend you move over to YouTube and watch if full screen at high-resolution.

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I continue to figure out how all this works. Today’s video shows some of the things possible when working with LRTimelapse in terms of cropping, zooming and panning. Included first is the full frame version of the scene that I shot. I had noticed while shooting that the pilot-boat intersected with a Vancouver-bound freighter, dropping a pilot on board for its passage through the confined waterways. However, with the wide-angle this small bit of drama is nearly invisible. I thought if I started the video with a tight crop and pulled back that it would draw attention to the interaction and viewers could peer closely to follow its progress and that is the second scene in the video. While I was peering closely I became entranced with how the wind passes over Clover Point and spreads its patterns across Ross Bay, so the third version holds that in view the whole time. The last scene is a tight crop of the freighter and then pans across the middle of the view following the pilot-boat back to harbour. Because I shot in a smaller RAW format than full frame, when I zoom in this tightly I no longer get a video at full size. I expect there is a way to get it to render larger, but probably the quality would suffer and for these uses I don’t really mind.

I am still having trouble with spot removal – in the third scene a spot removal location in the clouds is quite visible as it goes dark and bright – it was at about 60% transparency but this is not enough to disguise the repair. I must get that one particular bit of crud off my sensor as it makes a solid black mark that cannot be ignored.

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There are many things that please me about this time-lapse: the clouds, of course; the pilot-boat and wind in Ross Bay (if you look closely you can even see the storm drain); but also the small boat swinging wildly on a buoy in Gonzales Bay just above the spotlights of window-reflected light, and the sparkles of reflections from traffic on the roads.

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Technical Details: Canon EOS 5Dmkii, SMC Takumar 35mm/f3.5 lens, ISO100, 3-stop graduated ND filter, various edits from the same scene shot at f-11,  1/80th, 214 stills taken 4 seconds apart. Covers the time from 17:58 to 18:13hrs, April 19th, 2013. All taken with the aid of a Pixel TW-282 timer. Manual settings, custom white balance, smaller RAW files shot at 3861 x 2574. Edited in Lightroom 4 and LRTimelapse  2.3.1, then rendered as a movie through LR4 Slideshow module, with LRTimelapse templates at 24fps.

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