Over the past few months I’ve made some attempts at timelapse photography, mainly motivated by seeing this site/software on High Dynamic Time Range Images which effectively “blends” multiple images taken at different times into one final image.
Rather than use the above software (which is written in Perl), I decided to write my own implementation using my existing image processing infrastructure I have, and have so far come up with a simple implementation that supports linear “equi-width” blending, and in the future I plan to implement more varied interpolations similar to the original software, as from experimentation, Sunrises/Sunsets and the progression from day to night are not often linear in the resultant brightness of captured images.
Scenes with many lights in that progressively turn on within the timelapse duration seem to work very well generally: here are two examples I’m fairly happy with, showing both non-blended and fully-blended examples of each.
San Francisco:
Wellington:
There do though appear to be some types of scenes that don’t always seem to work that well with this technique, in particular ones where the sun is either quite prominent or the sky gradient in the horizontal direction is very noticeable: this can lead to “odd”-looking situations where the image “slices” which show the sky should in theory get darker as you progress through time, but due to the sky colour gradient in the source images, it counteracts this on one edge of each image slice, looking a bit weird (at least to my eyes).
I also tried converting a sunrise timelapse sequence I took several years ago in Australia which had clouds moving very slowly across the sky horizontally in the frame, and this produced what almost looked like an artifact-containing/repeating-pattern image (it was technically correct and valid though) in that the same bits of cloud were repeatedly in each image slice by coincidence due to their movement across the sky being in sync with the time delay between each subsequent image.
Other things to look out for are temporal position continuity when blending (see the Wellington blended version with the boat masts moving between captures above), where things like people, vehicles, and trees vary position over time, meaning the blending leads to “ghosting” due to the differing positions in the adjacent images which are being blended/merged together.
Last week I spent a few days down in the South Island around Queenstown and Wanaka, mainly to try and photograph the Autumn Colours. Apparently the term for this is a “Leaf Peeper”!
I’ve been several times before, but always in Spring or Summer, so this was the first time I’d seen any of the South Island in Autumn.
Whilst there is a bit of colour in Autumn in the North Island in places (in parks north of Wellington for example), there’s not much that I’ve seen in general (at least in comparison to the Northern Hemisphere), so it was a nostalgic memory of Autumn in the Northern Hemisphere, seeing the very widespread colours that occur there and I grew up with.
I think I’m correct in saying that almost all of the trees in New Zealand that have leaves which change colour in the Autumn are “exotic”, non-native species that have been imported from Europe, North America and Japan, with there being very few native deciduous trees (most are evergreen), and of those very few of them actually change colour.
Maples, English Beech (the native New Zealand Beech species are evergreen from what I can tell), Gum, Cherry and Horse chestnut trees seem almost certain to have been imported by early settlers, and the fact they seem to mostly be found along rivers and near settlements rather than being found out further away in more remote parts of the landscape seems to re-enforce that theory, but it’s difficult to know for certain.
Regardless, they do provide a very noticeable splash of colour on top of New Zealand’s already beautiful scenery in the area, and I did get some nice photos I’m happy with.
I’ve just got back from a fantastic week and a bit in the South Island, and was very lucky to have perfect weather for most of the trip, as well as getting a lucky view of the Aurora Australis (Southern Lights) one night.
I was in Queenstown at the time, and a phone app I have which gives notifications when Aurora might be visible at your location alerted me that it was likely visible, so I grabbed my camera and tripod to try and photograph it, starting during the later stages of dusk. There were two different “types” that were fairly faint but just visible to the naked eye: a green glow that really looked like light pollution - although there were no large towns in exactly that direction, and it morphed over time changing shape - and blue streaks, gently pulsing over time.
With a long exposure, they are much more clearly visible.
A very magical experience.
I also managed to get some excellent views of Aoraki / Mt Cook.
No matter how many times I see stunning sunsets, I never get bored of them. Similarly with photographing them and looking at the photos afterwards: even though they can to some extent technically be repetitive when looking through photos of them later, there’s just something I find very magical and awe-inspiring about them.
I spent the second half of last week on a short break in the South Island based mostly in Christchurch, although I ventured out a bit to the wider area of Canterbury. The weather was excellent for landscape / travel photography, and I managed to get some pretty good shots of snowy mountains, and for my third trip to Banks Peninsula finally got to see it in nice weather (although once again got the timing of the tides wrong as I often do!).
The general lack of international visitors / tourists was pretty pronounced, even in normally popular tourist spots.
A few weeks ago I finally got around to sending my Canon EOS 5D Mk IV in to Canon Service to be looked at regarding the very bad battery drain it has had since I got it almost a year ago, even when fully turned off.
Last week Canon returned it saying they’d replaced some parts to fix it, so as well as testing that they had - which was confirmed by a fully-charged battery still being charged 12 hours after being left in the camera overnight with it fully powered off! - I spent a few hours walking around town doing some photography.
