Few months ago I bought a compact point and shoot camera for making videos, and i started my own YouTube channel for vlogging. So, please check out my Youtube channel and subscribe HERE
I thought a long long time for starting to make videos, but i was kind of scared to do that. Maybe i was scared of my friends and other peoples reactions. I have to say, that after first 10 videos, i've made many mistakes but i've learned a lot. And now for me it's terrible to look my first videos :-) but it's also funny to see how much different my last videos are compairing to first ones, even if time difference is only few months. I think it takes time to find your own style to make videos..
This is totally new thing for me and I'm not good in front of the camera, and it doesn't make things easier that i try to do these videos in english, which is not my mother language. so it's not so easy for me ;-)
But i'm learning new things all the time, and i will continue to do these videos, because it's really fun.
Please don't loose you're hope after first few videos :-)
Sorry guys.. What's my excuse for not updating my blog for a long time...? I've been lazy or busy ? Well both but mostly lazy, i admit that. But lots of things have happened since i last wrote to my blog. Our wedding party was one of them and our honeymoon trip to Iceland.. Speaking of that, you can watch some of our videos of Iceland. Very, very VERY beautiful place in my eyes.. We saw a lot in one week, but it's a big Island, so we also missed a lot.. We had a car for a week with unlimited kilometers and we drove about 2600km in five days. Weather wasn't that good, but it wasn't totally bad either.. I'll put here later some pictures, but before that, go and look few short videoclips from our trip to Iceland in Youtube.. Links below.
I finally did my first time lapse video. Time lapse is a short video, which is made of still pictures merged to a fast moving video. Making time lapse video is fun but also it takes time. You could take as many pictures as you want, only limitations comes with battery life and memory. This time I took 450 still pictures, which took with my camera and quality settings 15.8Gb of memory, one picture in every five seconds. It took totally about 30 minutes, so you just have to wait while your camera is taking those pictures, remember to keep your self warm. A final video using 24 frames/second, will be only 18 seconds long. For example if you want to shoot a sunset, you could take one picture in every one minute, because there's not much movement. Ok, if you want to make a very long sunset time lapse video which will be 30 seconds long, you have to shoot 12 hours :-). There is also easier ways to do a time lapse video. One way is just simply to shoot a long video and with computer and video softwares make it to go faster. In many cameras, like also in my Nikon and Olympus, is a shooting mode, which will do atomatically a time lapse video, but a quality of that video is not that good.
And because this was my first time, of course I did some mistakes, but next time I know better.
Few things to remember:
Location
Maybe one of the most important thing is to find a good and interesting location, there should be some movement like sunset, sunrise, water, clouds, people, cars etc. My mistake was, that in my location there wasn't much movement and I also started a little bit too late, so there's too much dark time in the end of the movie. Practicing time lapse in situation where day is turning into night is not the easiest situation because the brightness is changing.
Tripod
Use a tripod, because if your camera will move between the shots, it won't look good in final video (moving time lapses are a different story).
Timer
In my Nikon camera is a possibility to set a timer. I can set how many pictures I want to take and how long is the pause time between each photo. Usually shorter pause between the photos will give you a smoother video. If you don't have that timer function in your camera, you can buy an external timer, intervalometer.
Manual focus
Use manual focus, you don't want that your camera will focus every time when it's taking a picture. And in the dark situations it might be that your camera can't even focus, and then your final video is ruined. So use auto focus to focus or focus manually and set auto focus off before you start to take photos. I used my camera's live view and magnification option to focus manually.
Manual settings
Shoot in manual mode, so you can control everything by your self.
White balance
I'm using RAW format, so white balance setting is not that critical, because you can change white balance in post processing. Auto white balance option is not a good choice in time lapse, because your camera might change white balance between pictures, and that effects to your final video.
High depth of field (Aperture)
Use high depth of field, so as much things are in focus as possible. This time I used F10 but it could be more if other settings allow you to do that. You can use also smaller F-number if you want that kind of effect to your video.
Low ISO less noise
I tried to keep my ISO setting as low as possible, so the noise will be minimal. In this video I used ISO 80. In the future, I will also try ISO AUTO setting and look how it works in time lapse.
Shutter speed (exposure time)
That was a little bit tricky. Faster shutter speed will freeze the action and slower shutter speed will give a motion blur. Basically it means that how long your camera will take a picture. Big boys are saying that in time lapse you should give a little bit blur, longer exposure time to your pictures, because it will look smoother in the final video. I set my exposure to 2.5 seconds.
Set your screen off to save battery.
Set your image stabilisation function off, if you have one.
Set your auto power off setting off just in case, you don't want that your camera will automatically shut down after some time.
Don't kick your tripod :-)
I did some post processing in Lightroom CC. And I also created this final video in Lightroom, using a free time lapse plug in.
So here's my very first time lapse video. In YouTube.
On thursday 31.12.2015, in the last day of 2015, we did something nice with my wife. We took a bus to the Contra Dam. Contra Dam (also known as the Verzasca Dam or the Locarno Dam) is an arch dam on the Verzasca River in the Val Verzasca of Ticino, Switzerland. Contra Dam was constructed between 1961 and 1965, the height of the dam is 220 meters and it's the fourth tallest dam in Switzerland. I wanted to visit especially this dam because of the 20 years old movie. The dam became popular after "James Bond" jumped off it in the opening scene of the film GoldenEye in 1995.
Tourist season is over, so we were alone most of the time, which was nice. Weather was quite misty and temperature about +5 degrees.
It is huge.. From the distance, you can't imagine the size of it, and pictures can't tell you much. But when you are on the top of it and you look down, you'll notice the size. I was amazed. And this dam is barely in top 50 world wide, if you compare the heights of the dams.
That is (about) the view James Bond (British stuntman Wayne Michaels) saw, when he jumped off, 20 years ago.
You can also experience that view if you want. A company called Trekking Outdoor Team is doing Bungy Jumps in Contra Dam. Prices between 195-255 CHF. Now they are in the winter break till the end of march 2016, but you can do online bookings already.
In the other side of the dam is a "man made" lake called Lago di Vogorno.
The dam supports a 105 MW Verzasca Hydroelectric Power Station and generates an average of 234 GWh annually.
And because we didn't want to wait almost two hours for the next bus, we walked back down. It took only about one hour to walk, and it was nice way to burn some Christmas calories too. Well it didn't actually help much, because we went straight to a restaurant in Locarno to eat some Asian food :-)
After all it was a nice day and a great place to visit.
