Tilted Motion

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

Bitzer – 2009-12-02 23:41:55

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Photography