Time Lapse - Night Sky

We went bush camping again for a couple of nights over Easter.

I was keen to try our the new CamRanger (CR) with the 1D-X doing some time-lapse photography.

One of the great things about the CR is the ability to view the image live on the iPhone, so getting focus is much easier than the sometimes awkward angles you get in to see the screen whilst pointing the lens to the sky.

Hooking the CR up is so simple. Plug the USB into the unit and the camera body. Switch it on, connect the iPhone to the WiFi hotspot created by the CR and volla! live view on the iPhone.

I fitted 24-70mm L Series Canon glass to the Canon big gun and did a couple of test shots to get the right exposure.

I ended up using ISO 8000, F8 to get a 20" exposure. Any shorter than 20 seconds and you need a higher ISO, any longer and the stars stop being dots and start to become lines due to their apparent movement from the earth's rotation. The f8 aperture was to ensure the trees were in focus as well as the stars.

Next step was to dial into the CR app on the iPhone 300 shots 30 seconds apart - thats a 10 second movie at 30 fps covering 150mins of rotation.

Hit start and wait......

150mins is a long time in the cool night. I had a campfire to keep me warm and occupied. If you look carefully in the movie you will see some sections show a reddish hue on the trees - no doubt when a few extra logs went on the fire.

So why isn't the movie 10secs long? A simple but stupid answer. The camera battery went flat. Note to self. Don't do a long time-lapse sequence with a camera battery on half charge.

Anyway the result is pretty pleasing albeit short.

Enjoy.

To produce the movie I export the pics from Aperture to JPG then I use Time-Lapse (available on the app store from Microprojects) to put the pic into a movie. In this instance I have produced the movie in iMovie to add the titles and music etc..

OT - Google Reader Replacement

Up front apologies to my photofile readers but I didn't have anywhere else to post this. I just it might be helpful to any die hard Google Reader (GR) users. Please bear with me while I go off topic.

I've tried 3 of the recommended options for replacing GR when it is pulled on July 1, 2013

First I tried ifttt - this is a really cool service that allows you to create "recipes" which are like web based macros for dealing with information on the web. You can link emails to Evernote to DropBox to Facebook etc... It works reasonably well but not perfect and its a bit clunky as a replacement for GR. I set up an RSS to email recipe which sent an email to a new Gmail account. It posted fine but too many moving parts.

Second I tried theoldreader - not bad. It has the familiar GR feel but is suffering badly at the moment due to high demand. I got sick of waiting.

Lastly I tried feedly - I should have come here first. For an inexplicable reason I didn't want to load another app into my chrome browser. Its a stupid thing I have about keeping this clean. I'm guessing it comes from the bad old windows days when a system would slowly grind to a halt after loading too much stuff onto it - even if you removed the software the system would still run like a dog. Anyway if I can get away with not installing another application I usually will take the pure web alternative.

Well silly me. Feedly (dumb name) works just great. Sure I am taking one big bet that these guys will deliver on the promise to migrate to their own rss api. At the moment they are simply a new front end for GR but they have promised to deliver a stand alone alternative. I'm backing them in to do so.

Oh and BTW the IOS app for feedly looks and works great. It has a bit of a windows 8 feel to it but I like that. I actually think IOS is in desperate need of a refresh but that another post - another day - maybe.

Anyway - "Go Feedly".