As I indicated earlier, I’m going to be spending some time this year getting into “videography” a bit. I know very little about this topic, so whatever I post or write will truly be learning from my mistakes (and it’ll be a brutal process, I’m sure). But one of the things I did before being a father was to make two purchases.
The first was a “Glidecam” – this is basically a stabilizer for my DSLR camera. The camera sits on top, carefully balanced with weights. You then hold the whole thing with a handle connected to a gimbal, so the camera almost looks like it’s flying through the air. My first learnings? It’s HARD to use, DIFFICULT to balance, but once I figured out how to use it I’ve been pleased with the results!
The other purchase was actually a gift from Adriana – it’s a slider. I put the camera on rails and then it … you guessed it … slides. You’ll see a lot of footage from the slider on the Nursery video embedded below. You can mount it vertically, horizontally or anything in between and it adds a bit of professionalism and drama to the scene.
Both of these new tools take a lot of getting used to – at least my experience has not been an easy one. The learning curve is pretty steep, particularly on the glidecam, so it’s been a slow process. Couple that with the fact that I don’t know much about video in general and it’s quite the experience!
Anyway, below you can check out my first video; I’ve had this sitting in draft for quite some time and I’m finally now getting round to posting it. Hope you enjoy and in the future if I ever get the time I’d like to share a bit more about how this was made, but for the time being this will have to wait!
Well I know I’m about a week late, but I put together a collection of my favorite photos from my travels with Adriana over 2012. I’ve recently joined Vimeo so am starting to post some videos there – this will be where I post videos that I’ve really worked on, whereas YouTube will still be my dumping ground for random outtakes and what not. Kinda like Flickr vs. 500px but we’ll save that post for another day.
I did struggle a bit in making this – it seemed that the image quality degraded when I built the movie in iMovie. I looked around on the web and this seems to be a somewhat common occurrence with iMovie. But I’m not yet willing to invest in a better movie editor until I can justify the cost. So for the time being this will do.
Anyway, without further ado, please have a look back at 2012!
After many days of sun, fun and photos, it was time to wrap up our trip of Bali. We closed out our last days with an early morning trip to Lovina Beach, in the northern part of the island. Now Lovina is famous for being a great location to watch dolphins. You get on these cutters and go out on the water at sunrise, and if you believe the hype there are scores of beautiful dolphins around. We decided to give it a spin. Dolphins are beautiful animals, and it’s not often that you get the opportunity to see many of them in the water with you.
Man what a bust. This is the one pic that I got of a dolphin off Lovina beach. So you can see it’s definitely not a sure thing. However I will say that we ran into other people that went on other days and really had a great experience. So it’s really luck of the draw (or the dolphin’s decision, depending on how you look at it).
After the lacklustre performance at Lovina we drove to a temple, called Brahma Vihara Arama. It’s actually a Buddhist temple with some Hindu elements, and it was impressive. I took the HDR photo below because the sun was so harsh, I’m pleased with the way it turned out.
The picture below is of the two statues at the entrance; I put the focus on the latter statue in an effort to draw the eye into the picture a little more.
We left Brahma Vihara Arama and drove into the mountains on our way home; this is where we saw yet another of Bali’s famous temples, known as Pura Ulun Danu Bratan. It’s sitting in one of the mountain lakes and is probably tied with Tanah Lot for being one of the more iconic images of Bali. This is one of the those places where I just took way too many pictures. The temple is so incredibly photogenic and on the day we were there the sun was coming in and out behind the clouds to really change the lighting every few minutes. I think my favorite version of this picture is above but I like the two below as well.
And across the street from this temple was another one. This one was relatively small and “quiet” looking, and I’m sorry I don’t know the name of it. But there was absolutely no one around and it was yet another opportunity to capture the essence of the island.
I also created a map so you get some clarity on where all these temples are and maybe it will help you understand your trip if you get to Bali and want to take some pictures of the temples. I hope you find it useful.
Ladies and gents, this concludes our week in Bali! If you ever get the opportunity to visit I would highly recommend it. For those of you looking for simple peace and quiet you may occasionally be frustrated. The island is busy, it’s developed in many areas and it may not give you the seclusion that you’re looking for. But it’s a great place to visit, the temples are incredibly photo worthy and the people are wonderful. Highly recommended!
Finally, I leave you with a brief video of our journey, we didn’t get much footage while in Bali but I figured I’d post it anyway. It’s worth watching just for the video of me trying to impersonate Zoolander – “Water is the essence of wetness!”
I recently took a trip to Macau, China and wanted to write a little bit about the photos I took there. Macau is a former Portuguese colony, having been founded during the “Age of Exploration” in the 17th century. Because of it’s history there’s the opportunity to take photos of the older buildings in the colonial centre. But right now it’s safe to say Macau has become recognised as the gambling capital of China, or the “Vegas of Asia” if you will. So let’s cover both pieces as separate topics.
In the colonial centre there are a few famous areas including Senado Square, St. Dominic’s church, the Fortress and the ruins of St. Paul’s (now only a facade), all of which can be a part of great images from Macau. Below you can see an HDR photo of St. Dominic’s church that I took; this was taken handheld because I didn’t have my tripod at the time (just not possible to always lug the thing around!) Since the square has a lot to offer with different architectural combinations I again went with a wide angle lens to get the expansive effect; I like the detail in the tiled courtyard with the famous Portuguese sidewalks.
Up the road from this church is the more famous ruins of St. Paul’s. This is only a stone facade but stands atop a small hill and is incredibly beautiful. I found this to be a bit tricky to get a shot that I liked; the stairs and the church aren’t quite in alignment, which means you can’t take a symmetric picture that maintains balance. Once I figured this out I decided to take some pics from further up the steps to get them out of the frame. So I focused on detail in some pics and with others I wanted to get the overall effect of the front of the building. I was moderately pleased with this effort but after visiting the fort and coming back down I realised the better angle for the pic is from the side; in my opinion it strengthens the fact that this is a facade and leaves one to wonder what happened to the rest of the church (it burned to the ground a total of three times, most recently in 1835).
Like any good tourist we also spent a little time in one of the souvenir shops where we bought a few things; I took this picture of the inside of the store.
Macau was busy much like the rest of China, so on our walk back I took a few pictures of the busy street, similar to my street shots of Hong Kong.
But while walking down the street I noticed something interesting – the sidewalks in Macau, true to their Portuguese heritage, are decorated with images and symbols of maritime life in the 17th century. So there are pictures of fish, birds, the sun, and plenty of ships galore. I thought this was pretty unique and interesting so I took a picture of all of the unique ones I could see on our walk back and put together this little mosaic you see here.
By the way I built this in Photoshop (if I ever get time I’d love to do a tutorial on how to do something like this) but when it was done the image was a tiff file of like 3 Gb. Man did it grind my computer to a halt. Needless to say I made it smaller before putting on SmugMug.
Amidst the gambling at night we also found some time to go out and take photos. For this walk I definitely brought my tripod as I wanted to get some good night shots; I chose to take these as HDR so I bracketed the images (some are 3, some are 5), put them together in Photomatix Pro, and then used Photoshop to mask out some of the signs. Unfortunately this was more difficult than I thought – there are so many lights on the casinos and you need to run through some of the more prevalent ones to make sure the exposure is correct and you mask out the necessary parts. This is explained fully in Stuck in Customs tutorial.
And of course I have to close with a picture of me and my beautiful wife!
Macau really is a tremendous fusion of European and Asian cultures and the colonial centre is a great example of this. That being said I found myself enjoying the casinos a bit more than the historical buildings 🙂 If you’d like to get another view of Macau please check out the video my wife and I made of our trip there. Like our last video this is just a collection of random clippings we took while out and about; I’m no Spielberg but like anything else you’ve gotta start somewhere.
Postcard Intellect 