My best sunrise / moon rise time lapse yet.

It is bit short because I fell asleep again while the camera was clicking away and the (16GB) memory card filled.

The image sequence was created with a graduated filter on the camera and exposure bracketing (three exposures) about 10 seconds apart. The 1200+ images were batch processed in Photomatix using averaging. The image sequences was put together in Quicktime 7 and the titles added in Final Cut Express..

I have made another small step developing my techniques to capture the moon and sun rises.

This time, at 20 second intervals, I took brackets of three photographs with different exposures and then used HDR software to create one richer image (using batch processing in Photomatics). The HDR images were then put on a timeline to create the video.

The video is very short because the technique was experimental (and processing the HDR images took about 5 hours).

Unfortunately, I don’t have a flicker removal plugin for Final Cut Express, so I’m not sure how to deal with that. More puzzling and experimenting tonight.

Having bought a cheap replacement tripod, I decided to test it out for some time lapse photographs from my balcony, which faces more or less directly east.

I was a little late getting back to the hotel for the moon rise so it had already appeared by the time I was properly set up.

The result is somewhat satisfactory … though its clear I altered the controls a little too much part way through. In addition, the highlights are overblown (I didn’t correct in Aperture before exporting to create the video sequence).

I worked quite late putting the moonrise sequences together and learned some lessons for the second attempt (early this morning, after 5 hours sleep).

The added use of a graduated neutral density filter helps, though the cheap tripod rotated a little as I added an additional neutral density filter to keep the exposures long enough to smooth the motion (the change is smoothness is quite noticeable). I batch processed the images in Aperture first to crop, adjust the colour a little and to remove a nasty dust spot.

Both of these sequences used about 250 photographs.

For some reason, Vimeo doesn’t seem to keep the 16:9 aspect ratio with the new plugin and I need to work on my compression settings a little, the large files on my Macintosh are much clearer.

I’ll try another set of moon and sunrises tonight and tomorrow and hopefully see some improvement.

I managed to find two tripods for sale in Kavala yesterday, neither of them a match for the one I lost.

However, I took the plunge and bought the cheaper (I couldn’t really tell one from the other even though the prices varied by €50.

I managed some infrared photos and three panoramas during the day.

This is a portion of a full 360 degrees panorama taken with my little GF1. Because I had the camera in landscape rather than portrait mode the full panorama is too long and then to be pleasing. This portion though highlights the central harbour in Kavala, with the castle in the background.

This one is a bit better, captured with my canon on the tripod and showing the view from the castle out over the sea.

This one also captured on the canon and tripod showing the view from the castle back over the harbour with the sun setting (facing more or less the opposite direction to the photograph immediately above and giving a birds eye view of the area captured by the infrared panorama).

All was going well with my photography holiday. My plan was to work on three techniques: infrared, time lapse and panoramas.

I’d got some reasonable practices in on the first in Germany and Greece and last week, thanks to an old archived post by some community minded photographers at outbackphoto.com, my infrared processing has improved.

This photo I rather like and is taken in the centre of Athens, the Akropolis is visible at the top of the hill between the metro station on the right and the building on the left (a couple of you reading this might have received it as a postcard).

My friend Nikolaos took me on Sunday to the mountain overlooking the Athens and this was the best of the infrared photos I managed there.

Time lapse was practised in the evenings in Toronto recently and I posted some examples last month.

The third technique I wanted to practise was panorama. This involves taking a series of photographs and stitching them together in software. I’d some success with the technique a long time ago in Chongqing and even own an almost 3kg tripod head to help make the process more manageable.

From the mountain overlooking Athens, Nikolaos and I managed this one:

This was actually ten photographs, stitched together using Hugin.

Now, the thing in common with all this techniques is that they need a tripod (infrared shots take at least a couple of seconds, time lapse takes a photo every 20 seconds or so for hours and the panorama requires the camera to be rotated about an in line with camera’s focal plane.

So, the disaster? I lost my tripod. Despite having taken it with me around China several times, through Australia and to bits of North America, I managed to loose it between two metro stops in Athens on the way to the airport (for the flight to North Greece to really practise with some beautiful scenery).

By picturesque, I mean this is the view from my balcony, and the sun and moon rise over the sea within clear view on the right.

And this is the view of the town centre at night.

Altogether, some lovely time lapse and panorama opportunities.

Bummer.

Holidays are a useful time to catch up with hobbies that the working months do not allow for. Given its so hot here in Athens, I have been experimenting again with infrared.

My little GF1 is quite good for this because the infrared cut filter on the sensor is not as good as with my SLR so the video viewfinder actually shows enough of the photo to frame and focus. On the SLR its all trial and error with the focus and screwing in and out the infrared filter for the framing.

The first of these photos shows the way that leaves reflect the near infrared light quite uniformly, despite being quite different textures and colours. The only processing I did was to convert from the red captured by the camera to black and white.

The second photo is a little more experimental and I tinkered a bit to highlight the rubbish, a testament to the relative public squalor of Greece (compared to some of the private wealth).

A random conversation recently prompted me to think a bit more about using photoshop and so on the day before holidays began, my copy arrived by courier and I have been playing a little bit. The first task was to learn a little about masking, having seen it work quite strikingly in a gallery in Shanghai.

On a simple subject, like the one above, it only takes about five minutes to get a reasonable effect.

I went to Matlock and Matlock Bath on the weekend, both being Victorian towns in the Derbyshire Dales, the latter being an old spa town now very popular for motorcyclists to visit. The weather was lovely and some of the scenery great. Unfortunately, my photographs were nothing to write home about.

Board with trying to tinker with the photos to make them realistic and presentable, I decided to do the opposite, using the HDR software over-saturate the colours.

The effect is almost cartoon like and rather fun. Three of these are from Matlock Bath and one on Jubilee Campus from a few weeks ago.

A former student (and now friend) of mine is spending a semester in the UK as part of his PhD studies in Australia.

We met in Birmingham and wandered around a little to see the sights while talking about teaching and research.

Show on map

The cities in the English Midlands are useful places to visit for those if us who are students of business — they are home, of course, to the first industrial revolution. No thinking about national, social, organisational or technological change can be complete without some attention to what happened in these cities.

Some of the former riches and grandure is clearly visible (as of course is the new wealth, though I haven’t shown that).

One of the highlights was the interior of the Old Joint Stock pub where we had a tasty upmarket pub lunch (not photograhed because every one was eating).

Alas, with the UK’s creaky regional rail system, it takes a bit longer to get there than it should.

Now, back to work for me.

In my breaks and the odd evening, I have slowly been playing with Aperture some more to tinker with my photographs.

I covered the distinction between photography as documentation or journalism and photography as art in an earlier post (see here).

To match my rather grey mood, I have been reducing the intensity of colour in some photos.

I quite like the effect.

Its also possible to increase the intensity of just one colour band (blue quite clearly, for example in the photo in the link noted above).

I have done that to all of the photographs in the gallery above to some extent.

No masking has been used to isolate the colour effect to just one part of the photograph (that requires Photoshop or similar).

I rather like the old-fashioned colour effect that the two techniques together produce.

I have slowly been getting back into some experimenting with multimedia. Some of this has been prompted by my experiments with podcasts and subsequent attempts to think about adding supporting text and interactivity to them (all without spending 3 days a week to produce 10 minutes that will only be used once). Some has been prompted by seeing the work of others. Some has been prompted by new technology.

One idea that I had been discussing with a more multimedia and technologically savvy buddy has been produced fantastically and is available on Wired. The project captured sights and sounds for the internet and has them in a visual and sonic collage.

While this is probably not at all useful for my teaching, it could be the basis for a great student project (particularly for field schools). While I wouldn’t expect business school students to be quite so artistic and to, instead, be somewhat more explicit in their expression of meaning, so kind of audio visual collage could be a useful part of making sense of a field school project.

I have also been motivated by by the release of a new Canon camera (the 5D Mark II). I’ve been waiting for this for a very long time as an update to my ageing (camera) body. The new camera is much, much better in low light (for evening and night time footage) and, most impressively, has excellent video capabilities. Vincent Laforet’s blog had (and will have again) links to footage from a pre-release version of the camera.

While, the video capabilities are much better than I could ever use, it will mean only taking one device and using my existing lenses. So, for capturing some sense of movement, video interviews and documenting student experiences on the field school, this sounds idea (if a little excessive). It will mean developing some new skills with video editing and a more dynamic sense of interaction with the world I want to capture.

Finally, I have been pondering the difference between photography from a journalist’s perspective and from an artists perspective. The journalist seeks to show the world as it is, though it might be hidden from view (and perhaps change it through that documentation). The artist seeks to show it in different ways, to force us to reconceptualise what we already know (and perhaps change it through that process). Perhaps there is a third category, who takes photos of pretty things.

This photograph is in the second category. Its in the second category because I have attempted to highlight the grand old building in Market Square. Lots of people don’t like the new fountain. However, I think it works powerfully to not overshadow the building and not overpower the space for people to meet. By hyper-saturating the colours, I hope to show the building as it is, and as the square will be once the fountain because an accepted, naturalised part of the square.