Feb. '10 Update and Photos from Last Year

January has slipped by, and I haven't used up my camera in anger in a long while. I've been busy with LEGO stuff as well as remodeling our kitchen at home.

I have a bunch of photos taken at the High Lonesome last November and December that I need to edit and process. I've quickly done three of my favorites:

click to see larger

I also made another time-lapse video of the night sky last December. This time, the exposures were much longer: 25 sec. instead of 8 sec. as the previous time-lapse video.

This video (click thumbnail below) is composed of 100 photos played at 8 frames per second. Each photo was shot at: 25 sec., f/1.8, ISO 3200.

click to see video
(1.5 MB, Windows Media File)

The files were shot as small JPGs on FINE with heavy noise reduction turned on. The long-exposure NR was turned off. Again, this was done using my "low-light" combo: the Canon 5DII and 24mm f/1.4II lens.

Night Sky Time Lapse

And now for something completely different:

6MB .WMV Video - click to watch

This is a short video made from 297 photos taken over a period of nearly 45 minutes. Each photo was 8 seconds long (shot at 24mm, f/1.8, ISO 12.8k), and there was a break of 1 second between frames.

I turned off the long exposure noise reduction, but turned on the high ISO noise reduction. It did help some, but I still applied noise reduction in post processing. The files were shot as small JPGs. I contemplated shooting sRAW, but didn't want to deal with file sizes 4 to 5 times larger than a fine quality JPG.

This was an experiment to see if it could be done, and I think it worked quite well. The movie is a little jerky - probably a resut of 0.125 sec. per frame (i.e. 8 frames per second video). I'd like to redo this in the future with different software and perhaps make it faster (maybe 15 frames per second).