Tilted Motion
How to breathe life into the miniature wonderland of tilt-shift photography.
It seems that tilt-shift photography is all over the place right now, and as
you probably read before, I am taking part in it. The tilt-shift technique however
gains an extra dimention (quite literally) when it's not just used for still
images, but for movies as well. Using a low recording frame rate, movements
in the frame get jumpy and look similar to a stop motion sequence. There are
many examples of this on the web, but my inspiration mainly came from the mighty (and highly recommended)
Uniqlo Calendar, which shows extremely stylish and at the same time humorous scenes, shot with this technique.
The stop motion effect can be achieved in two ways (at least, these are the
only two possibilities that come to my mind):
a) Using a recent SLR with video capabilities, only every n-th frame from the
recording is used, e. g. shooting at 25 fps and using every 25th frame will
give you one frame per second.
b) Shoot regular photos using an interval timer. Sadly, this handy function
is not incorporated into any camera that I know of, but there's a little trick:
use a remote contol program. Canon ships one with its cameras, but it is compatible
with neither Windows Vista nor Windows 7. There are compatible third-party programs
available however.
Given that my current camera does not feature a video mode (but my next one
will), I used option B. So how does it work? Firstly, you'll need to lug around
quite a lot of gear: the camera of course, a tripod and a laptop with the remote
software installed. Connect the camera to the laptop via USB and you're ready
to go. The remote software can save the photos on the camera's memory card or
directly on the laptop's hard drive. You can set all camera and exposure settings
in the software, no need to fiddle with the camera knobs. One important tip:
set the camera to manual exposure mode. This prevents exposure changes during
the shooting of the sequence, which would pretty much ruin your video.
I started my experiments by recording 1 frame per second. Sadly, as I discovered
later, it is not really possible to go below that value, i. e. 0. 5 seconds
or something similar. The reason is that each image has to be saved or transferred
to the laptop, and while this transfer is in progress, you can't trigger the
camera. I found that for many scenes, 1 fps is not enough, because moving elements
in the frame are too fast and thus you won't get a recognizable movement in
the scene, just a chaotic mess.
I made a new Kotogoto splash screen from my first tilt-shift (actually you will
mostly use tilt with this technique) stop motion video. See it here.
Currently I am hunting for locations in Hamburg. They need to be somewhat high
off the ground so I can shoot down from there. If you know any locations, drop
me a line in the comments below. I can't wait to do more of these videos. The
splash screen will be updated with more videos once I got some more material.
One more short note about why everyone seems to be going crazy about DSLR video:
In the old days, you were either shooting photos or videos, and you built your
equipment according to what you wanted to do. Which means that if you were determined,
you'd either spend thousands of bucks on a good photo setup or a good video
setup. Since more and more DSLR cameras support video recording, it becomes
relatively cheap to set up semi-professional photo as well as video equipment,
all in one package! This double-use of DSLR cameras as video cameras allows
every avid photographer to also shoot high quality videos, including the ability
to use special effects such as the tilt-shift technique easily, which had previously
been very special hardware in the video world. This opens up lots and lots of
new possibilities for every photographer and visual artist!
Comments
Was ist denn mit der Serienbildfunktion (per Fernsteuerung)? Die macht doch drei Bilder pro Sekunde. Oder ist der Puffer da nicht groß genug für längere Serien?
Schönes Beispiel für Canon-DSLR-Stop-Motion-Filme übrigens auch:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6C0aZV9VK7Y
Making of:
http://www.wdrmaus.de/sachgeschichten/sachgeschichten/sachgeschichte.php5?id=359
:)
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