Imre Z. Balint, BSc, MPM, MBA

Finally made some time to complete part 2 of the solar eclipse time-lapse post. Let's get right into it, but first a quick warning message you all should read if you're not familiar with taking photos directly of the sun: Without proper solar filtration, there is a very real chance that you could cause serious and irreparable damage to your camera equipment, and more importantly serious or permanent eye damage such as blindness. If you do not feel comfortable with such photography, I do not recommend doing it... even what I did can be considered borderline (and I actually don't really recommend my method either), but I'll explain my actions below. Ok, now with that out of the way I'll start with a quick list of equipment used: - Olympus E-3 - 50-200mm Zuiko lens - 2X tele-converter - camera hand-held - Variable ND filter ... DIY type Nothing really stands out from the list above until you get to the last item, a do-it-yourself (DIY) variable ND filter. I ...

If it wasn't for my mother, I would have completely forgotten about the solar eclipse today! As it is I missed almost half of it! Arrrgggg!!! Oh well. At least I managed to capture the latter half with decent results, especially considering that there was some high altitude cloud cover with the occasional denser lower-level clouds that would almost completely obscure the sun. Now... seems I just can't get over this habit of working really late into the evening... or night... so I will follow up this post with the details I promise in the video. Interestingly, I found an alternative use for something something related to my next episode! But you'll just have to check back here later to find out what that is! G'night!

Well this blog post is certainly overdue so I'll get right to it! First off, I never intended to create a time-lapse movie of the thunderstorm that passed by on that warm mid-summer evening. Instead, I just wanted to take a few snapshots of the mammatus clouds which often form on the trailing edge of such storms. But after taking a few pictures it dawned on me that scene would make for an interesting time-lapse movie. The bad part about this situation was that the system was moving quite quickly and by the time I would have lugged out my tripod, placed my camera on it and started shooting, a fairly large portion of this storm would have moved beyond my humble line of sight in my backyard. So to heck with it I figured and I ended up hand-holding the camera for several minutes and ended up with four seconds worth of footage, a total of 120 frames --frames were two seconds apart. Now if you viewed the video, you might have noticed that it seems quite steady; in other words not muc...

Well I finally uploaded a new video to my YouTube Channel! A quick thunderstorm passed over Calgary and just after it was gone and the rain subsided, I grabbed my Oly E-P2 and snapped away at the sunset lit mammatus cloud formations at the trailing edge of the storm. Old habits die hard and once again it's quite late, so I'll be writing up a second part to this post detailing how I created this video. Enjoy the quick show! L8r!

That time-lapse episode I produced sure clicked something to the "on" position in my head because I can hardly stop thinking about it. Recently I've been tinkering with my iPhone and checking out apps that can accomplish this task; more specifically those that have an intervalometer feature. I also like free stuff and came across two programs, both created by JOBY , called Gorillacam and Frame X Frame . After playing around with both apps I find myself much more attracted to Gorillacam even if it has been replaced by the newer Frame X Frame. For me the reason is simple, because Gorillacam saves full sized images while Frame X Frame only saves them as puny 512px x 384px files. The iPhone (3GS in my case) may not have a spectacular camera, but using its 3MP images I can create 720P HD videos. Yeay! The quality using those tiny pics was so lacking in my opinion, that I didn't even bother posting that test movie created using Frame By Frame. Boo! :( Essentially, bot...