Beautiful Time Lapse Video

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This Time Lapse video blew me away. A full description of it from the Tenerife based photographer Daniel Lopez is included below. Enjoy!

“El Cielo de Canarias” / “Canary Sky”

Project produced by Daniel Lopez. www.elcielodecanarias.com

Scenes taken from Tenerife, more than 2,000 meters above sea level and over a year to capture all possible shades, clouds, stars, colors from a unique landscape and from one of the best skies on the planet.
First in a series of videos nocturnal and crepuscular Time Lapse taken in the Canary Islands trying to capture the beauty of each island.

To capture the natural movement of the earth, stars, clouds, sun and moon TimeLapse technique was used, Dolly vertical and horizontal rails, spindles with horizontal and vertical movements. HDR data collection.

Some scenes of the video:

– “The Cathedral” in the plain of Ucanca, night shot with the planet Jupiter across the scene.
– El Arbol de Piedra (Roque Cinchado) with a Tajinaste pointing to Polaris.
– Tajinastes “night”, The Red Tajinaste, endemism Canario blooming in spring.
– The “hat” in the Teide. Formation of a cloud known as cap at the peak of Teide.
– “Waterfalls of clouds crossing the mountains and rivers of multicolored clouds.
– Sea of clouds crashing against the mountains as it did the sea.
– Large pool of water in the plain of Ucanca lenticular clouds where stars are reflected.
– Tajinastes night with the Milky Way taken out on the horizon with a dolly track.
– Video of the sun setting and a double green flash. “
– Pleiades and the Andromeda galaxy between rocks in the mines of San Jose.
– Scenes spectacular sunset in the Teide National Park with clouds and moving dolly.
– ArcoIris from the Teide National Park.
– Multicolor Halos around the moon.
– Clouds remain stationary hours at the site are changing their colors as the sunset

Daniel Lopez is a photographer / astrophotographer based in Tenerife . Works by photography and video, specializing in evening using many techniques, from camera tripod grasp heaven and earth in the same photo, amateur telescopes to take pictures of astronomical objects to professional telescopes to capture details and high resolution. It also performs and produces videos about nature, landscapes and interesting places in the draw is always something new and take another different view and “magical.”

www.elcielodecanarias.com

 

Free Training? You’d be daft not too!

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online learning.jpgWhen something is advertised as ‘Free’ it often comes with strings attached and is rarely, really, free.  The good folks over at creativeLIVE are offering something for nothing, well almost, but the something they ask back is a little bit of word-of-mouth promotion and it is well worth it for what you get in return.

I have enrolled on several of their Photography courses in the past and the talent they have brought in has been considerable, including Chase Jarvis (who was instrumental in setting this project up), Scott Bourne (Aperture master), Zack Arias (Rock photographer/Lighting guru) and that’s just the Photographers!  There are many more talented people who have lent their talents to the creativeLIVE courses and who have shared their knowledge for free.

If you can’t tune in at the time the course is going out live, you can catch up later, sometimes they stream the event on a loop for a few days afterwards and then video courses are available for purchase afterwards, at a fairly reasonable rate for the number of hours tuition you get from the professionals involved, usually around $79-$129 depending on the amount of content.

They even streamed a whole weekend workshop live (actually 3 days) with the awesome Vincent Laforet on HD DSLR Video Production, which was very detailed and fascinating for the bits I was able to tune in for.

To top that, starting this Wednesday 25th creativeLIVE are running a Jasmine Star (super adulated Wedding Photographer with the best looking blog I have ever seen) workshop for 5 days, to include live streaming of the Photographer as she covers a real wedding.

That’s 5 days!  What these guys and girls are providing for free is really, really impressive.

The only downside is that the time difference can be a bit of a pain for us in the UK, with some courses, such as the one I have just enrolled on Web Design Boot Camp running very late, in this case from 11pm – 1am GMT.  So unless they stream that one for free afterwards I would have to pay to see it probably.

If you are at all curious about the Photography, Web Design, Photoshop, CS5, even Water Colour world, you should definitely check out the creativeLIVE calendar and see what is coming up, you can’t beat the price!

One Flash and a bit of talent

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I have wanted to experiment with off-Camera Flash for ages but I always thought you needed 2, 3 or even 4 of them to make a decent shot and at £350+ per unit, I had given up on the idea.  Having seen this video from Derrick Story, I now know that very decent results are achievable with just one, albeit still very expensive, Flash unit and a great deal of talent.

I still can’t afford to buy one, but this has made me even more interested in saving up and scouring eBay for a decent secondhand Canon 580 EXII or whatever it will be called by the time I finally get one.  I can dream…

Data loss: It is not if, it is WHEN!

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Part of my job is to explain why we need to backup our data, and whilst it is very hard to appreciate why you should go to all the effort when the chances of data loss are relatively small, the chance is there, and ever present with the increased amount of digital data that we are storing nowadays.

Chase Jarvis is a really amazing visual artist. As well as being a top notch Photographer/Media producer, he is also a great Teacher/Instructor and, unlike many professional photographers in days gone by, he loves to share the secrets behind what he does to get the results. I have learnt a lot from Chase and his team and been inspired in the past by their practical approach to Photography, but also the artistic side too.

In the video below Chase, and his (very professional) team, show us how their workflow has been setup, from capturing the shot/video through to final storage and output via backup processes for servers and individual machines. It is something to aspire to and is based on a full-on professional studio, but the principles of redundant backups, off-site backups and individual machines with Time Machine running (giving hourly versions of files), are useful to anybody.

If you have ever been unfortunate enough to lose cherished photos of moments that can never be repeated (I have) then you will know how painful and time consuming, (not to mention expensive!) data recovery can be.

It is vitally important to have a solid backup policy in place. At the very least it should include an on-site daily backup, copied to an off-site/online location of your key data.

Please, take the time to watch this very stylish and informative video, even if you have just a passing interest. One day you might be very thankful you did. And if you have any data loss horror stories feel free to leave a comment and share the pain.

Remember: With data loss, it is not if it is WHEN!

‘The Underwater Project’ – Photography Beneath The Waves

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I can’t swim. I have tried to learn, several times, but my confidence in the water has been shattered. Yet, I live by the Sea, I love to be near the Sea, and it scares and fascinates me in equal measure.

That is why I love this video.  I can only imagine what it must feel like to be amongst such powerful waves with any amount of confidence, let alone have enough composure to take photographs and produce such great results.

The images in this video are gorgeous and awe inspiring because of the power of the Sea demonstrated in them but also the moments in time that photographer Mark Tipple has captured.  Have a look at Mark’s site for some more stunning documentary photography, and I recommend watching this video in HD at fullscreen size if you can.

The Underwater Project from The Underwater Project on Vimeo.

Can you really do HDR on the iPhone? Pro HDR mini review Part 2

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Pro HDR main screenThis is the second of a two part post about the Pro HDR app for the iPhone.  In this post I include some examples of what the app can do, and talk about why I like it and bought it.

In the first part of this two-parter I talked about how the Pro HDR iPhone app by eyeappsllc looks and works.  In this second part I wanted to include a few examples and show what the app could do with the photos fed into it.
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Can you really do HDR on the iPhone? Pro HDR mini review Part 1

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Pro HDR main screenCan you really do HDR on the iPhone? I take a look at the Pro HDR app and provide some examples of what it can do, so you can see for yourself before buying. Short version: I like it! Read on to see why.

A few days ago I saw a Tweet linking to a photo and it included a ProHDR hashtag. I viewed the photo and thought it looked good, but my interest was piqued by exploring the hashtag further on Twitter.  The results that some people had achieved were quite impressive.  So I thought I would have a go at creating an HDR type photo on the iPhone myself.  I enjoyed the process so much and was impressed enough with the results that I was inspired to blog it and share the results here with you, dear reader. More