Thunderstorms over the Water Tower from David Kennedy on Vimeo.

In the wee hours of the morning on June 2, 2010, a wave of thunderstorms swept through Columbia, Missouri.  I took it as an opportunity to make a “thunderstorm time-lapse,” and set up my tripod.  My apartment faces one of Columbia’s landmarks, the water tower, but to get a decent composition of it, I actually had to use a 300mm lens, several feet from the door to my balcony (no need to get wet, though!).  I was hoping for some lightning strikes, but the reflections of the lightning on the water tower, and the illumination of the clouds, was all I could get in the hour that I made these images.

I set the camera up on a remote trigger with an intervalometer, and exposed them all at 30 seconds @ f/9 using 200 ISO on the 5D Mark II and 300mm f/4 L lens.  The time lapse above is made of 57 such photographs.

I should note that part of the process of putting this time lapse together was discovering opsound.com, a resource of royalty-free music.

Overall, the thunderstorm presented a good opportunity and it was a lot of fun to put the time-lapse together; I hope you enjoy the final product.

Content © 2010 David Kennedy | Permalink | Comment! | Updates: multimedia, nature, thunderstorm, time lapse, video, weather

In my picture story & photographic essay class at the Missouri School of Journalism, we have been asked to find some examples of what can make for an effective sequence of images.  While I ultimately will be required to produce one that is more about people than wildlife, I did think this sequence of images of a Galapagos Giant Tortoise from this summer was an entertaining and appropriate.

Additionally, the idea of the “sequence” can be interpreted broadly.  A sequence could be two pictures (a diptych), three pictures (a triptych), or it could be hundreds put together into a time lapse.  Timescapes.org is an example of the latter.  They are working on what will eventually be a full-length movie composed of video and time-lapse photography.  One example they have produced–a series of time lapses–is shared below.  Interesting stuff!

Timescapes – Mountain Light:

Content © 2010 David Kennedy | Permalink | Comment! | Picture Story: Galapagos, multimedia, nature, sequence, time lapse, wildlife

After acquiring an intervalometer for my Canon camera bodies a la eBay (the knock off Chinese kind, not the official Canon product that costs more than $100!), I decided to mess around with my first (experimental) time lapse video.

This is a technique that I can (hopefully) use for much more creative applications in the future. Hey, you have to start somewhere!

Content © 2008 David Kennedy | Permalink | Comment! | Updates: time lapse, video