Sekon

The last few weeks have been spent hard at work on a couple different projects. And for once, I can actually share one with you. This is a short time lapse film I shot during my vacation last month in the Adirondacks. This is something I've wanted to do for over a year now but never got around to doing because frankly, my area lacks the sort of grandeur that makes a time lapse pop. Our annual vacation spot on the other hand had no such deficiency.

I'd watched quite a few time lapse films online and read a bit about how they're made at Philip Bloom's excellent blog. And being the sort of person who never bothers to read the manual, I took that cursory bit of information and plunged in without a second thought.

The shooting was pretty straight forward. The only problems I ran into there were dying batteries and uncooperative skies. For instance I shot one time lapse sequence of dawn breaking. Which would be awesome if it hadn't been completely overcast, meaning I had a time lapse of the sky shifting from dark grey to light grey. Riveting it wasn't.

When we got home from vacation I dumped the 6,000+ photos onto my desktop and started trying to put it together. This is where the lack of information thing became a problem and I stumbled down a lot of blind alleys before figuring each step out. That two and a half minute video took me three weeks to assemble. Now that I know what I'm doing I could do it again from scratch in less than a week, which gives you an idea of how many mistakes I made along the way.

But I'm very pleased with final result. I would highly recommend watching it in HD though. It makes a huge difference I think. Something about Vimeo's compression makes for a less than (for me) pleasing result.

The music is from one of my favorite bands, Southern Culture on the Skids. If you ever find them playing near you, go see them. You won't regret it.