burnt embers

Frequent visitors to this blog will have seen that I have a bit of a thing about photographing the View Towers building (click here for the others). On Wednesday evening I experimented with my phone camera panorama feature to try to get a shot that imparted the feel of the building looming (see below) over the bus stop I used to wait at nearly every day. On Thursday morning (yesterday) the other side of the building was on fire. Fortunately there were no serious injuries – 1 resident and 4 (or 6, reports vary) police officers who were clearing the building suffered smoke inhalation. However, many people are out of their homes and likely will be staying in shelters for long periods of time.

Yesterday morning I had my phone camera with me, so I experimented with shots in various modes, but mostly using animation of a somewhat unrefined “Cinemagraph” type (I love cinemagraphs and have wanted to make some for a long time which meant that finding my phone will make them was a really pleasant surprise). Unfortunately, this mode creates very large files (often greater than 10meg) which will choke up devices without a fast connection. I have made the gifs somewhat smaller and put them into the gallery below since WP will not allow reduction in gif sizes, though it will create animated thumbnails. I recommend you only open the gallery if you have a fast connection, but I think it is worth finding one as the images work very well.

I have also included some stills, all straight out of the camera without even being reduced in size (click on them for the full size) with no edits of any kind. The top image is taken with a telephoto setting from a block away. The next two images are the ones I took on Wednesday from the other side of the building using the panorama mode. The building has just finished a 1 year or longer face-lift involved a lot of sealing of cracks and repainting and so on. Looks like that work is not over quite yet.

The image before the gallery is taken yesterday on the north side in panorama mode. The panorama feature takes many photos while the camera is panned and stitches together little slivers. It often works pretty well, but can result in stripey effects if the panning is not perfect. I think it works better for horizontal panning than vertical, but there are many interesting effects possible, like the middle picture below, which allow for creative stuff to be done. I hope to post more about that sometime soon once I have the permissions of the people in the photos.

I have reduced the gif size with an online service which works quite well – it took some of the largest files that are larger than 11mb down to 3 or 4mb with many choices of ways to do it, like reducing the numbers of colours, choosing every second frame, reducing the number of pixels and other methods, some of which can be combined. I sometimes added a watermark through this service as well. I left one image full-sized for comparison.

One thing the on-line software does is to break apart all the images in the gif so that they can be edited and recombined into a new animation. The only problem is that the phone feature that allows freezing motion in areas of the photo is lost in that process. However, it was surprising to find that there were 142 images comprising the gif, sized about 260mb each.

The shots are taken over the course of 5 seconds and then combined in the camera, with editing features that allow identification of areas to freeze or animate (using your finger tip or a stylus). This is not a very precise tool, as can be seen in the gallery where I managed to isolate the mask from the rest of the image. You can also set the direction of the motion (forward, back, or back and forth). I think the back and forth option probably doubles the images up and doubles the file size too, so probably the single direction option probably uses 71 images and those files are a bit less than 4mb.

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To open gallery, find a fast connection then click on any image, and navigate with the arrows and escape to return to this page.

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Samsung Galaxy S4 using inbuilt camera app in Animation and Panorama modes.

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