Adventures in Time-Lapse

This video is copyright Richard A Roworth 2010 and must not be copied, published or broadcast in any way shape or form without written permission.

For a while I have been wanting to record a time-lapse video of falling snow. Today I (only just) got that chance. Although I knew snow was forecast, it wasn't scheduled to arrive until after dark so I thought my chances were slim. However, the snow arrived just before dusk so I managed to film 30 seconds worth (over 60 minutes). This worked out as 720 frames at 1 frame per 5 seconds.

Unfortunately I only had a few moments to set up as we had visitors, I was cooking dinner and our 1 week old baby needed feeding and changing! Also, the arrival of the snow took me by surprise so it is a bit of a rush job.

Nikon D300
50mm
f8 - 1.8

I left the camera on a/p as the light was fading, changing it to manual and 15th sec a few minutes before the end to produce the fade to black effect.

I also changed the aperture to f1.8 about half way through as condensation was smearing the glass of the patio door I was shooting through. This changed the depth of field which is an effect I might play around with in future time lapse projects.

Mistakes;

• White balance on auto.

• Perhaps it would have been better on full manual shutter, but I wouldn't have been able to alter the depth of field half way through.

• Little preparation time led to poor choice of composition.

• Tripod pressed against the patio door was not steady enough and led to camera movement.

The Waiting Game

It is not long now until our child will be let loose on this world, Mrs RaR is on the maternity ward although she would prefer to be at home. After spending most of the day in the hospital, I am now at home, waiting for the call that labour has started. It could be tonight, it could be tomorrow, it could be Saturday. The only thing the midwife could confirm is that we will have our baby before Monday.

Are we prepared?

We have bought all there is to be bought (thanks for all the gifts), and read all there is to be read. I don’t think that we will ever actually feel prepared though. I believe that, with most things in life, preparation is part of the process and the more it is enjoyed the better the result. So we went to Ikea and bought some flat-pack furniture.

Ikea isn’t first on my list of places to shop but we needed a cot pretty urgently and hadn’t been able to find anything either suitable or in-stock anywhere. This was a few weeks ago now, but we were aware that shopping would become progressively harder as each week passed by (we were not wrong on this)!

We ended up buying a Leksvik, a Sniglar and a Vyssa Vackert to go in the Leksvic. After moving a few walls out of the way, we made it to the end of the maze and collected our goods from the warehouse section. The next stage was the build and a chance to use my new cordless drill/driver.

A few twists, turns and ****s later and the Leksvik had turned into a cot (and the Vyssa Vackert into a mattress);

After a few more expletives, the Sniglar had transformed into a Changing Table;