Yesterday I needed a little break from weddings and non-stop engagement sessions, etc.,...so I took my 5D, a couple of wide angle lenses, and a monopod up to a church carnival near my house. I wanted to make a slideshow but I couldn't make it move at the speed I needed it to...so I had to make it into a video. Let me know what you think...

That is FLIPPIN AWESOME Dan!! How in the world did you put that together?
Way KEWL!
Candy

Really cool, dan...

thanks for the reminder to get off my butt and shoot something besides weddings...

That is SOOOO great & artful! I would love to see a reception shot like that!

haha -- that is great!!! You even made a cameo appearance in it.

I'd say it was easy but that wouldn't really be accurate...more like it was very simple (in concept) but required a little patience and technical persistence to create the show. The majority of the images (out of ~330 or so total) were shot at 1/4 second, ~f8.0. I used a monopod and for a lot of the shots in the middle of the crowds I wasn't looking thru the viewfinder because I knew that would cause people to think I was taking their picture (and I'd get goofy looks or people apologizing thinking they just cut in front of my shot)...so I set the monopod at about 4 feet and kinda leaned on the camera with my left wrist resting on the hotshoe (though I was actually pressing the shutter with my left index finger...taking a LOT of pictures).

After uploading the shots to bridge...I viewed it in slideshow mode with my finger holding down the -> right arrow key. That looked pretty cool so I decided to find a song that seemed to fit the pace of the images flying by (resembling a slow fps video) and then try to recreate the process of me holding down the arrow key to advance the images in rapid succession.

Then came the tricky part -- finding something that would allow me to vary the timing to fit the tempo / pace of the song (or at least come close). I didn't have the patience to manually set the timing using showit...so I had to resort to creating a video using Windows Movie Maker (ShowIt's fastest "global" setting for image display is 0.5 second...I needed much faster....WMM's fastest setting is 0.125 second...so that's the route I took). I varied the timing between 0.125 (for the faster parts of the song) and 0.375 (for the slower parts). 330 frames went by quick...like less than 40 seconds...so the finished (is anything ever finished?) -- version you see here -- has each image appear multiple times so what you are seeing is around 1,000 frames in around 3 minutes. WMM crashed on me a number of times -- that was the patience and persistence coming in to play -- I'm sure I could have done this easier with a fancier video program...but I don't currently own one.

To do this same kind of thing over...I'd probably (A) find a bigger carnival w/ more rides and (B) take way more images knowing what effect I was going to accomplish after learning from this.



Now THAT is an interesting idea! I have a cool reception spot coming up at an August wedding...I might just have to bring along a third shooter to accomplish that mission!! Kinda fun to think about doing something like this while actually having a little time to plan / execute the details...rather than the fire, aim, ready approach I just took (and usually take).



Couldn't resist... (though if I really stayed true to my form...I would have found like a fun-house mirror at the carnival...and then shot some self-portraits... )

That's really cool. I'm still trying to wrap my head around 1/4 second exposures at 8fps, though. You make me think too hard.

That is very cool! Great job

Very cool...makes me wanna go to the carnival!! Great job!

Awesome Dan!! That was really fun!!

It's eight VIDEO frames per second. Slow it down...speed it back up...and embellish both along the way.

Wait...doesn't everybody see life this way? (Adam...you have kids...you know what I'm talking about!!!)

How fun! That reminds me that there is a church fair near me that I was planning to shoot. I better go look up the dates now.