Inverary: A Tale of Three Techniques

In August I called in on an old friend in Inverary for a small guided tour around the local forests with camera in hand.

There was one particular photo I had in mind – ever since I first saw an old ruined barn with disused farm machinery, it was crying-out for the bokeh-panorama (aka Brenizer) technique – instead of one straight shot composed with the final focal-length in mind, one uses a longer lens (preferably a fast prime) and stitches the results into a panorama, to give an image with narrower DoF than was possible at the focal length in question.

Here’s the straight scene, taken on the Fuji X-H1 on the 16-50mm f/2.8 at 18mm – even wide open there’s no significant blurring in the background.

So here’s the stitched result, taken using a Helios 56mm f/2 wide open – drastic focus drop-off:

It took 100 frames at source – 2.4Gpx – but the result would be the equivalent of an 18mm lens at f/0.6. 

The second technique was keystone/perspective adjustment. On seeing a stone waterworks in the woods, my friend challenged me to get a view of it straight-on without using the drone. That’s simple enough – even though it’s several feet above head-height.

The third technique was simple long exposure: night had long fallen before I left the town but the clouds moving across Loch Fyne/Shira looked pleasantly ominous. Keeping base ISO, f/6.4 gave a 7s base exposure – with HDR 5*±2/3EV this became 7+18+30+27+10 = 92s combined total, retaining exposure from brightest point of clouds into shadowy areas in the mountainsides. (Contrast is not just a daytime problem!)

Several long exposures blended together into an HDR image of clouds and smooth water, Loch Shira from Inverary.

Another day… another sunset

“Slight chance of convective weather” is rapidly becoming my new favourite weather alert, especially coming at the end of the day where it signals turbulent blends of low sun, rain and thick clouds.
It doesn’t get much better than last night, either. With sunset happening just after dinner… perfect 🙂

And my favoured view of the receding hills into Strathearn was looking particularly lovely in orange-pink tones too:

Sunset and showers – beautiful warm pink light despite the rain pouring down.

Frame interpolation for timelapse, using Julia

A long time ago I wrote a python utility to interpolate frames for use in timelapse. This project was timelapse.py.

Back in 2014 I ported the idea to the very-alpha-level language Julia.

In recent weeks Julia released version v1.0.0, followed shortly by compatibility fixes in the Images.jl library.

And so I’m pleased to announce that the julia implementation of my project, timelapse.jl (working simply off file mtimes without reference to exif) has also been updated to work with julia v1.0.0 and the new Images.jl API.

Usage:

zsh/scr, photos 11:32AM sunset/ % ls *
images-in/:
med-00001.png med-00022.png med-00065.png med-00085.png
med-00009.png med-00044.png med-00074.png

images-out/:

zsh/scr, photos 11:32AM sunset/ % ~/j/timelapse/timelapse.jl 50 images-in images-out
[1.536147186333474e9] - Starting
[1.536147186333673e9] - Loading modules
[1.536147201591988e9] - Sorting parameters
[1.536147201648837e9] - Reading images from directory [images-in]
[1.536147202022173e9] - Interpolating 50 frames
[1.53614720592181e9] - frame 1 / 50 left=1, right=2, prop=0.11999988555908203
[1.536147217019145e9] - saving images-out/image-00001.jpg
[1.536147218068828e9] - frame 2 / 50 left=1, right=2, prop=0.24000000953674316
[1.536147222013697e9] - saving images-out/image-00002.jpg
[1.536147222819911e9] - frame 3 / 50 left=1, right=2, prop=0.3599998950958252
[1.536147226688287e9] - saving images-out/image-00003.jpg

...

[1.536147597050891e9] - saving images-out/image-00048.jpg
[1.53614761140285e9] - frame 49 / 50 left=6, right=7, prop=0.880000114440918
[1.536147615090572e9] - saving images-out/image-00049.jpg
[1.536147615649168e9] - frame 50 / 50 left=6, right=7, prop=1.0
[1.536147619363807e9] - saving images-out/image-00050.jpg
[1.536147619960565e9] - All done
zsh/scr, photos 11:40AM sunset/ %

zsh/scr, photos 11:51AM sunset/ % ffmpeg -i images-out/image-%05d.jpg -qscale 0 -r 50 sunset-timelapse.mp4
ffmpeg version 3.4.2-2+b1 Copyright (c) 2000-2018 the FFmpeg developers

...

zsh/scr, photos 11:51AM sunset/ % ll -h sunset-timelapse.mp4
-rw------- 1 tim tim 4.9M Sep 5 11:46 sunset-timelapse.mp4