Time Lapse Video, Melbourne Southbank

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I recently attended PMA Australia, Southbank Melbourne. We stayed in an apartment block close by. I took some time lapse photos with my 5D Mk II from our 18th floor balcony. After a bit of experimenting I took 367 shots at 3 second intervals, f4.5, 0.7 sec exposure with a 24-105L set at 28mm. I then processed the RAW files in Lightroom, exported the images as full size jpg files 5616 x 3744. The resulting files were then loaded into Adobe Premiere Pro CS5. Then the trouble started, I have a i7 system with 6 gig of RAM and a NVIDIA GeForce GTX285 Video card, 3 HDD’s and my system almost ground to a halt. I wanted to pan and zoom as the images played through their time lapse segments. Even with my reasonably powerful system and CS5 with its new Mercury playback engine I could not play even 2 frames, no such thing as any sort of preview when loaded with 367, 21 megapixel images. So I basically set the zoom and pan settings, rendered the time line (which took about 15 minutes each time) made the necessary adjustments and rendered it again and again and again…, eventually I had my time lapse movie somewhat to my liking.

Southbank by night from Stephen Dyer on Vimeo.

Photo of the Month: May

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Wellington, New Zealand. This is another HDR image down near Wellington wharf as I said previously the weather was against me with grey overcast sky and intermittent rain. The rain was actually quite a help as it made the pavement stand out. This image was made up of 3 exposures then processed and enhanced in Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom. I was quite happy with the final image.

Photo of the Month: April

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This is a photo of the “Natural Arch” in Springbrook, Queensland, Australia. It was originally taken as 3 images with exposure bracketing to render using one of my HDR programs. I just could not get it right so I used Photoshop, masking out sections where necessary. I would love to return and try again, next time I would bracket manually over 5 or 6 frames.

Zimbabwe Orphans

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 Last year while in Zimbabwe for my son’s wedding I had the chance to visit a number of orphanages. A large percentage of the Zimbabwe population have AIDS so there is an extraordinary high number of orphans. One of the orphanages we visited was the “Voice of Peace” in Hatcliffe, they currently have almost 50 orphans living in extremely poor conditions, almost half have AIDS. When we first arrived the orphans were very depressed and quite. My wife and myself  were quite upset at their condition. Suzanne, the young lady that was showing us around the orphanages just embraced the children, giving them hugs and kisses, fed them with fresh fruit and then involved them in games. The transformation was surreal, this photo I believe captures a moment of happiness in the midst of despair.  I hope that this image might encourage to make a donation for the Zimbabwe Orphanages.

  
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