Huntington Beach Timelapse Part 1

[JimFox]

I started the new year on January 1st out at Huntington Beach at sunset. I had 2 cameras set up on tripods to do the timelapse as I was experimenting on the best way to do timelapse at the beach with moving water.

As is typical in SoCal the clouds were not moving fast, they barely move normally and just kind of seem to appear and disappear slowly at times. So this timelapse wasn't about fast moving clouds, it was about the water and the people. Anyone who has been to Huntington Beach, or any Southern California beach, you know there are people and lot's of them. When doing still photos, you can compose to avoid them or clone out the odd person or two, but with timelapse or video I chose to just embrace the people and enjoy their antics.

So this ended up not being a typical timelapse, I tried one, but as I was concerned with the gaps in timelapses and the fast movement of the waves that it could look too jerky as the water moved between frames that's what I found to happen. I will do more tests with true timelapses in the coming week or two at the beach, but for now my fall back plan seemed to work best. And that was one of the cool features in Movavi that Ben and I are using to create our timelapses you can speed up or slow down the video's (or timelapses). So in this case, I simply captured video with my Nikon D610 and then in Movavi, I sped up the playback until it matched what I felt was the speed of a timelapse which was 400%. The essence of a timelapse is seeing a longer period of "time" shown in a shorter period of time. So I think by speeding up the video playback by 400% it had the same feel as the timelapse I shot, but didn't suffer from missing parts of waves and water in playback.

As I played with panning and zooming with Nikon I also learned a few lessons. In this case the zoom lens I had on the D610 has a very tight zoom ring, so it was hard to smoothly zoom in or out. So I will need a different lens for that. Also panning should be done super slow, since the action of panning gets sped up in the timelapse process.

All comments are welcome, and hopefully more of you will join in on the fun that Ben and I are having. @Mike Lewis looks like he is going to join in with us, but the more the merrier!

Jim

*** Please Share this and all Video's here at FocalWorld.

 

[Ben Egbert]

Really cool Jim. I need to try that too. That would give me a third camera I could use, my EOS M.

How do you get You Tube to embed like this. The way I do it is to open the file in Youtube and then click on the address and copy and paste it.

Good tips on zoom and pan. I have read that some guys use a motorized panning head.

 

[AlanLichty]

Nice approach to the time lapse problem with waves. Neat color show for a sunset too.

 

[JimFox]

Really cool Jim. I need to try that too. That would give me a third camera I could use, my EOS M.

How do you get You Tube to embed like this. The way I do it is to open the file in Youtube and then click on the address and copy and paste it.

Good tips on zoom and pan. I have read that some guys use a motorized panning head.

Thanks Ben! Yeah, your EOS M would be good I think, though if I recall didn't it have some video issues? For me, the D610 is a backup of a backup for me, so it wasn't getting used much unless I wanted to set it up as a 4th camera when shooting the Milky Way. So this should work out great for me, and I was surprised that it has an in camera timelapse video ability since it's an older camera.

When you create the video, you will see on the window where it says Shareable link. Just click on the small 2 rectangular icon to the right of those words to copy the link to your clipboard for pasting. Or after it's created, in your list of video's mouse over the video and you will see next to some options, click on the one that has 3 vertical dots and you will see more options, one says Shareable Link. Click on that and it copies it to your clipboard. Just paste it into the text of your post.

@Jim Sanderson said he had a motorized pano mount. That might be something to look into down the road.

 

[JimFox]

One thing I keep forgetting to mention, let's be sure to make sure we both Like and Share the video's so we can get more exposure for the timelapses we are doing here.

 

[Ben Egbert]

Ok, Jim, I tried to share, but it would not me log into Facebook. Also I don't see a like button. I don't use Youtube much.

 

[Ben Egbert]

Ok, if I just click on your video, it plays ate reduced size within the Focal World window. If I expand it, it goes full size but does not have any room for the like buttons I see on my own videos. And it still won't let me share. I may not know my password for Facebook however.

 

[Mike Lewis]

Very cool result - the fast video seemed to work well for this subject. I have been reading that for timelapses using individual images (instead of video) longer exposures are good to use, as it tends to smooth out the jerkiness of things like waves and the jerkiness of people motion.

That often means the usage of an ND filter for daytime time-lapses. I plan to try that out next time.

ML

 

[Jim Sanderson]

Likes good to me. Not as many people as I thought there might be.

 

[JimFox]

Very cool result - the fast video seemed to work well for this subject. I have been reading that for timelapses using individual images (instead of video) longer exposures are good to use, as it tends to smooth out the jerkiness of things like waves and the jerkiness of people motion.

That often means the usage of an ND filter for daytime time-lapses. I plan to try that out next time.

ML

That could very well work Mike, and I guess it also depends on what we as photographers or now videographers want for it to look like. Perhaps for some, they want it to look jerky?

As for an ND with people.... not sure how that would work though. Because if you shoot slower then say 1/50th of a sec or so, everyone in the video will be blurred, you won't be able to even see them as people.

So the ND idea could work landscape images, but I don't see how they would work with people. If you look at my new night timelapse I posted from HB up on the pier this same night. I easily could have shot longer then 1/50th, but if I had there would be no recognizable people in the video, just a series of blurs.

Thanks for sharing that idea about the ND Mike, I think there is a lot of things we can learn on this, and some might work better then others, but thinking and experimenting is fun and a great way to learn.

 

[JimFox]

Likes good to me. Not as many people as I thought there might be.

Thanks Jim. While there was certainly people there, I was surprised too by the general lack of people.

 

[JimFox]

BTW, personally I enjoyed watching the one photographer who was photographing with a short tripod have to run back as the water came in, and then also when the guy with the metal detector was walking and weaving across.