Photons Everywhere

You read a lot about timelapse photography these days. And while I am not a video guy I never really payed much attention to it.

Last weekend I went out to shoot a fairly new building here; it has a very nice form and cool reflections. After setting up, I decided to give it a shot.  It was about 15 minutes to sunset. I had no real idea what interval to choose so i went with 10 seconds.

The below Video consists of 180 RAW photographs, shot with the same Apeture and slowly rising shutter speed. I have not manipulated the photos at all, used a shade White Balance since I did not want to waste too much time and miss sunset.

Overall I think it turned out OK but there are things I wold do different next time.

- If there are people moving in the foreground, I think 10 seconds is too long, might have to use 5 seconds.

- Never ever shoot horizontal, just not a good format for Video

- Research in getting an intervalometer since standing there with a cable release can get old.

As far as the export goes, I found some cool templates for the Adobe Lightroom 3 beta. There may be better ways as far as quality goes, but to get a first idea they work awesome.

Since Wordpress is giving me a hard time embedding a video – please go here to view

A little over a week ago I joined the Scott Kelby Worldwide Photowalk. It was a very interesting experience to walk about with 15 or so Photographers through the city of Roswell, GA.
I do think that this event, where worldwide about 30,000 Photographers in different cities meet to take photos is a great idea.
As I mentioned I went to the Photo Walk in Roswell. The Walk leader split the group up in 3 groups, two for the historic route and one on the nature walk. I guess it would be quite intimidating to walk with 50 Photographers down the road.

Even though I enjoyed the route I took, in hindsight I’d rather taken the nature route, it just suits me more. Either way below are some photos from the walk.

Roswell Photowalk Group © Mike Noa

A condemned Apartment complex.

This fairly old and very well kept cemetery offered a lot of opportunities for statues.

Roswell City Hall has a very traditional look.

A Corner

Summer Window

A civil war era Church that was used to house injured Soldiers

Finally spent some time editing the rest of “my fish”. There are a few I will enjoy re-taking when I go back. Having learned a lot about avoding glare, annoying children and un-cooperative fish.

I guess the first one as a tribute to today being Fathers Day

[clearspring_widget title="Late Night with Conan OBrien - Al-Qaida Endorsement (10/28/08)" wid="4727a250e66f9723" pid="490b406bb605a40f" width="384" height="283" domain="widgets.nbc.com"]

OK – wordpress seems to be challenged in displaying flash. So here is a link

Intro: This is the 3rd time now I am writing this post, like Homer not learning from my mistakes that even Firefox sucks and crashed on you.

Last weekend I finally made it out again to take some photos, it has been some time for me -

In the morning hours I went to the ‘Tour de Georgia’ cycling finals which was quite interesting; more and photos about that though in a later post – have not sifted through the 400+ photos I took.

In the afternoon I went to the Atlanta History Center again, but this time I went to the back gardens which are actually quite nice, and I am sure I will go there multiple times for some more photo visits.
The gardens offer a few acres of interesting architecture and landscaping.

Below are two photos that I think turned out nice, sure they don’t show too much of the gardens themselves but like in so many museums they put big signs in front of buildings explaining what it is, yet obstructing the photographers view – oh well, out to finding more perspectives.

The first shot reminds me of a Grapevine so my wife endearingly called it a Grape nut.

Old Barrier

There was a lot of news about Adobe in the past couple weeks.
First they released the first beta of their new free Photoshop Express tool, an online editing, displaying web site. Definitely some nice tools for quick editing, but the problem I would have with it, is that I would have to upload a jpeg and edit it further – re-saving it yet again loosing quality. I guess it’ll be an OK tool for casual photographers.

The news that exited me the most though, is the availability of the Lightroom 2 beta. It has a lot of exciting features. One being Dodge and Burn support but there are so many other you can read about on their Labs website.
I nice perk is that they also released a native 64bit version for Vista.
It is a shame it will not let me upgrade my existing catalog but hopefully a later beta will.

I have been using flickr for over one year now and in that time, the only thing I actually do like about it is the community aspect of it.

The problem I have is that you cannot customize your Galleries in the way they look/colors etc. A couple weeks back I signed up for the premium account with Zenfolio ( I don’t mind if you use code M12-9YV-BCG if you decide to signup for yourself, saves you $5).

Zenfolio has premium features, flickr and some other do not have, I potentially can even sell photos through their site making a profit.

So, in a Nutshell, all my photos are once-again at http://mbgaleria.com complementing my blog here at http://baumannphoto.com

P.S.: My wedding photos are on there in the Personal Gallery, feel free to visit. The Gallery is protected but use my last name in lower case as the password

The Gisteq Photo Tracker, a recent present I received was put to the test by me for the first time today.

When I received the device, it seemed very intuitive to use (having only three buttons) and it did not disappoint much.
One a trip today I left the device in the Dashboard of my car for the whole time and it recorded  all the time. When I downloaded the Photos I took today, it warned me once, that there were a couple photos taken when it has no recording real close to it. This happened when the car was parked for some time and the device became idle – no big deal, use the closest time you have as a location and continue. It all worked out very well. The only negative I can report is that, due to the idle timeout of 15 minutes (which can be changed or turned off though) it created 4 trips for my ~200 Mile route. Every time I parked for more than 15 minutes it must have created a new log. I saw on the Gisteq support forum that multiple people requested the ability to merge/split log files so I hope that is coming soon.

Since I shoot in RAW I had to upgrade to the PRO license for $20, the standard one only does JPEG, TIFF etc.

Overall a handy device to have, One I do not have to put onto my cameras hot-shoe.

When downloading the file it writes the location data directly to the RAW files and if you export to flickr, Picasa etc. it will show your Photos on the map.

In two days time I am no longer "free". I admit though that "free" is not the right term, was I ever free?

On Friday at 11am I will get married to my beautiful fiance Allison.
I hope there will be plenty photos (not only wedding photos) to show here.  I am still seriously considering to move my images to zenfolio.com and leave flickr be, maybe just post low-res photos there….that will warrant a seperate post though

Anyway, wish me luck