I currently have a few days off from work and thought I would try my hand at stop motion animation. I have all the tools already at my disposal, so it was just a matter of giving it a whirl. I thought I would use the assembly of a simple LEGO helicopter as the first run test.
I didn’t edit any of the photos and didn’t really set up everything properly as I was just giving it a try to see if I could get the concept down. After a couple of hours of photography and computer time, here is what I came up with:
For those interested, I used my Canon 40D with the 24-70 f/2.8L lens. I had it connected to an Alien Bees 1600 (lime green, of course) strobe that was pointed to the ceiling. I shot 1/125 @ f22 using the remote shutter release cable. I dumped the 141 images into iMovie set the length of each still and exported using the built in YouTube share feature… doesn’t get much easier than that.
I know it isn’t very pretty, but I was just after proof of concept here. I am going to plan a larger project to see how it goes. If you have any ideas, let me know!
Cheers!!
Edit: Apparently YouTube cut off the last few frames of the video… sorry!!
For being such a flying and photo geek, it took me a long time to really try some aerial photos. Today Stephanie and I went out to get aerial photos of a house for a friend. It was much more difficult than I expected. I knew it would be bumpy and that there would be a lot of vibration but it was daylight so I figured I could get a high shutter speed to counter that. I was getting around 1/640 @ f/4. Normally that would be good, but not today. I got 10 decent ones out of 70 and 4 that I ended up showing the customer. I’ll post them below.
I didn’t help that the outside air temperature was 28F and the window was open. We had to unscrew the bar that keeps the window from opening all the way. It’s pretty cool, the airflow keeps the window open during flight above 80 KIAS or so. It’s also really cold when the air temp is that low. After the 1st pass of 10 shots or so, I couldn’t feel my fingers. To get an idea, roll the window down next time you’re doing 80 on the highway and it is below freezing outside…
Even through the cold, I had a good time and am ready to go up and do some more!!
