I am happy to announce our new initiative: ElysiaVisuals. Elysia Visuals distributes professional motion control equipment that can be used for time-lapse photography or for general video footage. We mainly distribute equipment from Dynamic Perception. But we are in the process of expanding our offering in the near future. We have been very interested in time lapse photography for the last two years. This had lead to the development of our own equipment.
Today I received these PCB's in the post. I designed these myself. That was a difficult road since I had never done this before. Electronics is a hobby of mine, but designing and producing my own boards was always something that I tried to prevent. In the end it wasn't that hard. The board is designed with Eagle, a software package that is free to use for small non commercial boards. The boards were produced in China. The only drawback of that is that you have to wait six weeks before you get your results back.
Today is Humboldt Squid day. I just got a copy of "Duikmagazine", the best diving magazine that we have here in the Netherlands. The magazine features an eight page story about Humboldt Squids that I made last September. That trip brought us far into the Sea of Cortez. I was on a live aboard expedition with the goal to find these enormous Red Giants. It took a lot of time before we finally found the animals, but at least we found them. Duikmagazine has used one of my Humboldt Squid images for the cover.
I am currently running running a story about the Sharks of Cape town in the South African diving magazine DiveStyle. I love South Africa and I do love Cape Town. Our latest trip to South Africa brought us to various places including Cape Town. This is really a town that I can recommend. The city is great. The Table Mountain is great. The diving is more than great. Imagine a place where you can easily find Seven Gill Sharks, Mako's, Blue Sharks and Great White Sharks just to name a few. We visited Cape Town together with our twin girls who were only 18 months at that time.
Mooie tropische riffen, warm water en uitrusten onder een Palmboom, dat is wat veel duikers onder een duikvakantie verstaan. Koude bestemmingen, zoals Antarctica, lijken veel minder tot de verbeelding te spreken. Toch kan duiken in (sub) arctisch en antarctisch water fantastisch zijn. Dat zijn koude bestemmingen die door de gemiddelde duiker niet bezocht worden. Wie krijgt er een vakantiegevoel bij de gedachte om te gaan duiken onder 70cm dik ijs!
Andre Crone - Elysia Productions will, following the successful journey in 2011, lead an exclusive expedition to Mexico in 2012. The purpose of this expedition is photographing Sailfish. Sailfish are the fastest fish in the world and their hunting behavior is spectacular. The past year the trip was such a success that we decided to return in 2012. There are very few people who have seen this phenomenon since this is only done 5 or 6 years now.
I have mentioned the technical aspects of exposure ramping with a Nikon camera before on my blog. The has resulted in a lot of work for me the last month. The result is a ramping solution that works on both Nikon and other brands like Canon. The video that you see on this article is the first real outdoor test of my ramping solution. You are seeing the Maasboulevard, one of the main roads that bring you into the center of Rotterdam.
I gave an elaborate explanation about timelaps exposure ramping in my last blog called Bulb ramping with a Nikon dSLR - The technical story. I am very interested in exposure ramping timelapse photography. These are movies where you for example see a sunset while the exposure of the movie stays more or less the same. My previous blog describes a solution for a problem that Nikon camera's have when you use them for this complex technique.
I hate it when Canon users say that a Nikon is not capable of something. Well there is one thing that Canon camera's do better. Exposure ramping or bulb ramping. Imagine you want to create a time lapse movie of a sunset. Normally you would do that with a fixed shutter speed. But then your movie will become darker and darker when the sun sets. Wouldn't it be great if you can make the shutter speed longer after each frame? Then the day will go into the night and the night will have the same exposure. This is where bulb ramping comes in.
André Crone together with African Watersports will organize a photography trip to South Africa for the Sardine Run next year. This trip is planned from 5-11 July 2012. The Sardine Run is the most impressive showcase of natural predation in the world. Vast schools of Sardines are swept along the eastern coast of South Africa by an enormous body of cold water. These Sardines attract Dolphins, Humpback Whales, Brydes Whales, birds and many different kinds of sharks that all predate on the Sardines.
Here is the third field test of my time lapse dolly. I am finally getting a grip with this machine. This short video is not perfect yet, but I am close. I unfortunately made some miscalculations while setting up my rig. That resulted in an 8 seconds sequences which was a bit short for this test. This is the first test where I put a subject really close to my camera. I used a 14mm lens for this sequence. The movement of the dolly is smooth, but will be better next time.
Digital photography has brought us many multi shot techniques like focus stacking and HDRI. This story is about Focus Stacking, this is a technique that we can use to get a much larger depth of field than we normally get with digital camera's. The most well known is HDRI or High Dynamic Range Imaging. That is a technique that we can use to greatly enlarge the dynamic range of a digital camera. That is necessary because digital camera's do not offer us enough dynamic range in many natural conditions.
Volg nu een cursus onderwaterfotografie of een workshop onderwaterfotografie bij André Crone. André kan vanuit zijn ruime ervaring als internationaal publicerend onderwaterfotograaf jou verder helpen om betere onderwaterfoto's te maken. Ben je teleurgesteld door de foto's die je de laatste vakantie hebt gemaakt? Wil je meer leren over onderwaterfotorafie? Dan is deze cursus voor jouw! De cursus onderwaterfotografie, welke is gebaseerd op de NOB specialty die voor een groot deel is geschreven door André Crone, gaat vooral over de basis van de onderwaterfotografie.
Here is the result of my second field test of the OpenMoco time lapse dolly. The dolly performs very well. It is reaching a resolution of 300.000 steps over 2 meters. This means I can move the dolly 0.006 millimeters between shots. That should be enough I would think.
I am planning to take a lot of stuff underwater for my upcoming photo expedition. One of the items is a small Go Pro Hero action camera. These cameras are capable of filming in full HD resolution. I hope to film some of the making-of and behind-the-scenes stuff with this camera. I will post these videos here on my blog. Taking video is will become inevitable for underwater photographers since media are changing continiously. An example of this are the many iPad magazines that are coming out at the moment. Luckily most modern dSLR camera are capable of filming in HD resolution too.
