Hunter’s Beach, a 360° spherical panoramic timelapse

Timelapse 4K! Tiemlapse 360 grade! Timelapse panoramic! Timelapse cu exposure ramping! Starlapse! Vă gândiți probabil, că fiecare dintre aceste tehnici de timelapse este grozavă, nu? Greșit! Sau, cel puțin, asta ne-a demonstrat Aaron Priest, care le-a combinat pe toate, într-un singur video. Și a filmat totul cu o singură cameră. Waw! Și când crezi că le-ai văzut pe toate…

“For a little over a decade now I’ve been working towards a goal of shooting a 360° timelapse over a 24hr time period with a single camera. This is almost 9hrs of spherical panoramas, from 08:04 PM on May 20, 2015 to 04:51 AM on the 21st, of the Milky Way rising over Hunter’s Beach in Acadia National Park, Maine. I used a Nikon D810, shaved Nikon 10.5mm f/2.8 fisheye (forced to FX format), Panoneed robotic panning head, Ramper Pro, Goal Zero Sherpa 100, and Really Right Stuff TVC-34L tripod, clamps, nodal slide, and camera L bracket. I took 832 photos until the Sherpa 100 battery was exhausted. The RAW files were converted to 16-bit TIFFs via Lightroom and LRTimelapse (aaronpriestphoto.com/lrtimelapse), and then stitched into 208 spherical panoramas via PTGui’s batch feature. At 30fps it makes an almost 7 second video. The Panoneed’s .xml positioning files makes alignment and stitching each panorama very accurate. The original panoramic frames are 10712 x 5356, for a 10K video.

I animated the spherical panoramas as a 3D environment layer in After Effects with a virtual camera. Another thing I’ve wanted to accomplish for a long time is to animate a transition between stereographic projection (little planet) to rectilinear (normal) view. This is the shot that looks like a fisheye of the full sky and unwraps itself to a normal view of the Milky Way over the ocean. To do this I used the Sub Blue Little Planet plugin here: 2008.sub.blue/blog/2010/6/17/little_planets.html However, it relies on the Pixel Bender Toolkit which Adobe discontinued after CS5 in 2010. Recently, I discovered some developers created a new Pixel Bender Kernel Accelerator that runs on your GPU or video card and allows pixel bender kernels to work in newer versions of After Effects! aescripts.com/pixel-bender-accelerator/

While the Nikon D810 was shooting, I wandered around with my Nikon D700 and Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8 shooting some shorter timelapses and some stills. Mike & Shelley Lawie stopped by for much of the night and we had a great time shooting star trails and the Milky Way. The short timelapse of comet trails over Hunter’s Brook was taken from 8:17 PM to 10:02 PM, shortly before the beginning of nautical twilight when stars were just becoming visible and the sky was still blue, until the end of astronomic twilight. I ramped the exposure with the holy grail feature of DslrDashboard and edited the 136 photos with LRTimelapse & Lightroom. To animate the comet trails I used intermediate frames from Advanced Stacker Plus, a Photoshop plugin, and rendered them into a timelapse with After Effects.

All of the video was taken with my iPhone 6. The backpack is an f-stop Satori EXP with an XL Pro ICU and two large lens barrels on the sides. It easily holds everything!
I gotta thank PhotoPills for all the planning that went into this shot, from the physical location to catch the Milky Way over the cliff, to the dates/times of civil, nautical, and astronomic dawn/dusk for programming the Ramper Pro. It’s an amazing program that makes my life so much easier! itunes.apple.com/us/app/photopills/id596026805?mt=8&uo=4&at=11lLzC&ct=

My next workshop is on night timelapses, coming up in a couple weeks in Acadia from June 21 to 25, 2015, with Acadia Images Photography Workshops. There are still two spots available. Visit their website for more details: acadiaimages.com/”

Si un mic “Behind the scenes”, cu autorul: