Although my initial investigations into time-lapse photography were done on film back in 2004, my interest has still been there in recent years, and even more so since I got my first digital camera in late 2006.

Although I have been looking to do something that involves a series of continuous and rapid shots, I found that you can buy intervalometers fairly cheaply on eBay and so bought one a few weeks ago. The intervalometer can be used to set the time until the first photo is taken, the interval between photos and the total number of photos taken. As such, it is suited to more traditional time-lapse photography where the camera is set up and left to take a series of photos over a length of time.

The first time-lapse video that I made with my camera was the view from our lounge window, looking across the river towards the ferry stop at Bulimba. I set the intervalmoter to take a photo every 10 seconds and to take 399 photos. This is the maximum specified number of photos that can be taken with it, although it can be set to run until the memory card is full. Using a the rate of 1 photo every 10 seconds meant that it photographed the view of the river for just over an hour.

Having taken the photos I used the free version of Animator DV+ to animate the 399 still photos. I set the photos to play back at a rate of 15 frames per second, giving about 26 seconds of footage.

The video looked like this:

I took another series of photos out of the front room window, looking upstream this time, although somehow I managed to mess it up and manage to include part of the window frame in the shot…

After having done the 26 second movie looking upstream, using the intervalometer set to 399 shots, I repeated the downstream time-lapse with the intervalometer set to run until the memory card was full. I used the same setting as before, with a photo being taken every 10 seconds. In addition to creating a longer movie I also wanted to assess the camera settings as the sky got darker. I used a film speed of 200 ISO, an aperture of f8 and a shutter speed of 1/160. At the time I started this time-lapse this was slightly over-exposing each shot; I hoped by doing this that I would get more shots as it became darker.

At about 30 seconds into the time-lapse movie it suddenly gets dark. This was as a result of a storm moving in. The photos get darker and darker until the light outside became too dark that the camera couldn’t focus (I had set it on auto focus as opposed to manual focus).

The storm started very soon after this. I set the camera up to try to record this, however in my haste I didn’t change the ISO speed, with it left at the 200 ISO I had been using earlier. Although I changed the camera from manual to aperture mode, so that the shutter speed could change as the light deteriorated to give a correct exposure, this meant that almost from when I started taking the photos the shutter speed started to increase up to 10 seconds. For reasons unknown the camera also froze soon into the movie, although this was rectified by turning it off and back on again. I didn’t get very far into taking shots when the rain became so bad that the wind was blowing it back into our front room and all over my camera.

A blink and you miss it 3 seconds of storm… (the last frame is after I’d shut the window…)

Looking forward to the wet season; hopefully they’ll be some interesting storms to capture.

[DISCLAIMER: My girlfriend wanted to see Kate Miller-Heidke so asked me to request to do the photos at this gig…..]

Much loved by Sunrise, much loathed by a large majority of the Pig City audience, Kate Miller-Heidke was back in Brisbane for a couple of dates at The Zoo and an All Ages show at the Judith Wright Centre.

Her Pig City performance of three Go-Betweens songs – Streets of Your Town, Clouds, and Cattle and Cane - accompanied by the Brisbane Excelsior Band fell down on many levels: she was placed on the bill between Regurgitator and The Saints, which made her stick out like a sore thumb and being a very mainstream, newly signed major label act with a new record to plug she just didn’t fit in with the spirit of what the day was about.

Whilst the idea for using brass arrangements and the arrangements themselves were really awesome, they were somewhat spoilt by her cutesy-wutesy, very girly voice. Plus when she goes into opera-mode her body language completely changes, she stiffens up and her eyes roll back in her head… so I ended up with a load of photos where you can mainly see white where her pupils would normally be…

Seeing her ARIA award performance on TV did little to change my mind, being cringingly embarrassing on a night when most of the live performances were poor, with Operator Please probably putting in the best performance.

Having sold out The Tivoli last year I was expecting the place to be rammed, even though she was doing two nights and an all ages show, but, whilst a healthy turnout, it wasn’t. The crowd was probably about 85% female, which was interesting.

Technically you can’t really fault her voice and she is very charming in her between song banter. But listening to a whole set you can’t actually work out what her true voice and there is a lack of true emotion, which together with all the show pony vocal histrionics makes her come across like the Yngwie Malmsteen of female singer-songwriters.

A couple of the songs sounded good, there was one that she introduced as new that had some whole band harmonies going on that stood out, but a lot had really banal Play School-type melodies and lyrics, culminating in a really cringingly awful song about Australian Idol that wouldn’t have been out of place in a set by Victoria Wood. And then there was the “ironic” (at least I’m guessing it was ironic) cover of ‘You’re The Voice‘, which was one of the worst songs of the 1980s in the 1980s, let alone looking back at it in 2008.

My girlfriend enjoyed it though. So maybe it’s a girl thing.

More photos on flickr.

The first, and indeed last, time I saw Rocket Science was when I photographed the first Come Together festival at Luna Park in Sydney in April 2005. This was when it was a one day festival of smaller indie/alt Australian bands, before it became a two day metal/emo festival with Australian and International bands (although the 2008 bill, is one day of indie, one day of metal/emo). After that day they seemed to completely disappear.

Although they have had their share of mishaps over the years, not least singer/organist/theremin-ist Roman Tucker’s head injury/induced coma back in 2004, it seems like they’ve being doing the marriage, children, extra-curricular band thing for the last couple years.

Good to see them back and sounding so good. In typical fashion the Zoo lighting was rubbish, although not as bad as the recent My Disco gig. I only stayed for half their set as the May Day holiday on the Monday meant that the Rave deadline was midday on Friday and, as I don’t have access to Photoshop at work, I had to sort out the photos and send them in before I went to bed.

Gentle Ben & His Sensitive Side were first band on the night but weren’t at their best. Obviously missing Texas Kate who had flown off to Germany earlier in the day for the start of the Texas Tea European tour. I Heart Hiroshima were the main support and are doing the whole tour with Rocket Science. When I first saw them, back in maybe late 2005/early 2006 I thought they were a fantastic band and tipped them for great things on certain Australian music websites. Don’t know why but they’ve never been the same since Mel left. Seem to be doing ok for themselves though, with lots of high profile tour supports and festivals.

Some more photos on flickr.

Rocket Science

I Heart Hiroshima

I’m confirmed to photograph at this year’s Splendour In The Grass festival down at Byron Bay at the start of August.

The lineup so far is:

Devo
Wolfmother
Sigur Ros
The Living End
The Presets
Tricky
Vampire Weekend
Ben Lee
Cold War Kids
The Fratellis
The Wombats
PNAU
Laura Marling
The Vines
The Grates
Operator Please
Band Of Horses
Van She
The Panics
Gyroscope
Mstrkrft
Lightspeed Champion
The Brown Birds From Windy Hill
Scribe
The Music
The Gin Club

Hopefully the second announcement will have some more non-Australian acts as it’s a bit lightweight so far, especially for the money that they’re charging (AU$199 (+ booking fee) excluding accommodation – and Byron Bay really knows how to rip of people staying in the town for events, with prices tripling (and more) over the weekend. The Breeders should be playing as they’re on tour in Australia either side of Splendour so that’s one more plus point.

I’m wondering if I work like a dog and live on a diet of coffee and Red Bull for a couple of days whether it’s possible to do a live photo blog from a festival… I guess you don’t know until you try…

It’s a rare occurrence for the support bands to have much better lighting than the headline act, but somehow My Disco managed it. Although when you play in near darkness with no front lights it’s not too hard to achieve. Indeed Feathers, the first band on, had by far the best lighting of the night.

Gave up trying to get a good photo after a while as it was a lost cause. Went over to Ric’s and saw Sixfthick instead…

My Disco

This is about as good as it got for them – ISO800 f2.8 1/20… probably should have taken my f1.7 50mm lens with me…

Or alternately, this is what a head-banging guitarist looks like at 1/6 of a second…

Fabulous Diamonds

Secret Birds

Feathers

Some more photos on flickr.

For a long time I’ve been interested in time-lapse photography and stop motion animation with normal still cameras.

Back in 2004, when I was doing my part-time two year photography course at SCOLA, I did a couple of my projects based on these topics.

For one project I looked to make a music video using still photos for My First Knife Fight, a London band that I had used for another of my photography projects in the first year of my course. I was looking to create something akin to Michel Gondry’s video for the Rolling Stones’ cover of ‘Like A Rolling Stone‘.

In preparation for what I had in mind I did some test shots with my friend Wim. The test shots were done on a film camera, which proved somewhat problematic as the camera continuous film advance kept sticking as the film wound on and so the interval between shots became a bit more irregular. The camera should have been able to do 3 Frames Per Second (FPS) but with these problems the FPS kept varying. This would have made it problematic in terms of syncing the images to be in time with the music. And doing all of this on a film camera, I didn’t have the luxury of being able to delete and try again, like you would have with a digital camera these days, but did have the expense of using film and the time that it required to develop the film and scan the negatives in…

I scanned in the negatives for the best sequence of still photos that I managed to get during the test shots and imported them into Macromedia Director in order to animate the stills. When played normally the motion was very jerky.

In order to smooth the animation I overlaid the photos in Director’s timeline, i.e. the first photo overlapped the second photo slightly in the timeline, the second overlapped the third etc. Then I set the transparency of each photo to fade out as the next photo in the sequence faded in. The effect was a lot more successful and more in mind with what I was looking to achieve.

However, the band were having issues and about to split, so nothing ever came of taking what I had learnt during the test shots and doing a shoot to get the images for a full video.

As a result, I just ended up using a whole load of still images that I had taken of the band over the course of a year and putting them to music so that I could finish the project for my course. I was waiting on the band to provide me with an mp3 of one of their songs to use but it didn’t eventuate before the band split. Needing a song to complete the project, and this being in the days before every band had a Myspace page with some of their songs on it, I scoured as many random and little known songs as I could find in order to get a song I could pass off as a My First Knife Fight song to accompany the video.

I eventually found a song that was quite short, at well under 3 minutes (and so cut down my workload), had a grungy sound like My First Knife Fight and, coming from a friend in London’s Triple J Hottest 100 compilation, would be largely unknown in the UK. Trouble is that I moved to Australia in mid-2004 and ‘Berlin Chair‘ by You Am I is slightly better known here than in the UK… In putting the final video together I did a series of tests to sort out the best method to use. Below is the final trial and the method that I ended up using for the full video. There are a couple of mistakes in this test but it gives an idea of what the final video looked like.

Although I started off this theme of blog postings with Steve Gullick, that was largely as a result of his new exhibition in London and the associated interviews and write-ups that he was getting. Although he is one of my favourite music photographers, the true number one spot should go to a photographer who I only became aware of in the last few years, Herman Leonard.

As with myself, most music photographers seem to be completely unaware of Herman Leonard, even though they might have seen his work in print. I think that this is largely due to having moved in slightly different circles by photographing jazz musicians, meaning that he flies under the radar of most ‘rock’ music photographers. In addition, I think the fact that he started photographing in the 1940s means his work largely pre-dates the music photography of the 1960s of classic rock bands that photographers associate with as the starting point of music photography.

He used a large-format camera with sheet film, a world away from the digital technology that most photographers now use, and by using a large-format camera, the level of detail in his photos is amazing.

He did have one advantage over most modern day photographers in that a lot of his photographs were taken at rehearsals/sound checks, allowing him to bring and set up his own lights and not rely on the venues own lights, or more likely the lack of light.

But that should in no way take away from his work, which is truly exquisite and completely awe inspiring.

What I’ve tried to take from him is his portrait style of photographing and also the beauty of monochrome; I still convert probably the vast majority of photos to black and white or convert and tone them even when they look good in colour, and even photos taken in daylight. There’s just something about black and white that can take a good colour photos and amplify the results substantially by converting it to a monochrome image.

By chance I was re-checking out his website late in 2006 and saw that he was doing at book signing of his new book ‘Jazz, Giants and Journeys: The Photography of Herman Leonard’ at Book Soup in LA and that you could order a copy over the internet. So have a nice signed copy on my shelf, as seen in the photo at the top of the page.

However, I also picked up a copy of one of his previous books, ‘Eye of Jazz’, on eBay cheaply and if you can get hold of it, I really recommend you do so, as it’s fantastic and soley devoted to his music photography, whereas ‘Jazz, Giants and Journeys’ is a mix of his music, travel and portrait photography.

There’s a really good 30 minute interview Herman did at San Diego’s KPBS radio on their website, here.

Hope I’m sounding that good and being that passionate about photography when I’m 84…

Danica and Andrea from new Brisbane band The Holy Bible came around for a Sunday afternoon photo-shoot for some promo shots.

This was the first time that I had used the new lighting set-up in anger so was a pretty exciting time. I had planned on being really prepared and having everything ready for when they arrived but made the mistake of going to Westfield in Chermside to buy a new mobile, got hopelessly lost, and took over 20 minutes to find where I parked my car when I came out of the building… So it was then a bit of a panic when I finally got back.

I used a similar setting to some of my test shots for a high-key set-up, with a softbox on the background and a reflector on the other side of the room to bounce some of this light back onto the backdrop and a shoot-through umbrella on the mezzanine level balcony as the key light. We also did some other set-ups and did some shots with a black background, although I prefer the initial set of photos.

The lighting worked quite well, especially for blowing out the creases on the fabric backdrop/floor. There is a bit of blow out on Danica as she was stood closer to the light lighting the backdrop. Next time I try this set-up I will have to move it a bit further around and closer to the backdrop or maybe put a gobo between the light and the subject. Also in the initial panic and rush to get everything set up I forgot to change the ISO setting on my camera from the last gig I was at, so despite using my flash meter to meter for ISO 200 I ended up doing some of the first photos at ISO 800. Doh…

I probably should airbrush Danica’s legs… God knows what she did to get all those bumps and bruises… looks like she fell out of a tree and then rolled down a mountain… But that’s a job for another time…

All in all a good, fun afternoon and I was pretty happy with how it went for my first shoot. Hopefully the first of many.

Monday night gigs are strange affairs; they’re quite a rare occurrence – indeed a fair number of bars and pubs are shut every Monday in Brisbane – and yet they bring out the most devoted and passionate fans. It’s a different vibe to a more typical Thursday, Friday or Saturday night show when there are usually more scenesters, fair-weather fans and hangers-on in the crowd on a normal night out. So whilst The Zoo was maybe only a third full for tonight’s visit of Biffy Clyro – a bit of a surprise considering that their latest album, ‘Puzzle’, reached #2 in the UK album charts and they are the Saturday night headlining act on the John Peel Stage at Glastonbury in June – there was a really great and friendly atmosphere.

In addition to the rare occurrence of a Monday night gig, there was also the even rarer occasion of a cold Zoo, a venue renown for its unbearable summer temperatures, with the gig happening on what was being predicted as the coldest April night in Brisbane in 25 years. However, a cold night in Brisbane is obviously a veritable heatwave in Scotland, with singer/guitarist Simon and drummer Ben both playing the whole of their set shirtless.

Most reviews/interviews of the band tend to include a comparison to Nirvana, but other than the fact they’re a 3-piece, play rock and rock hard there’s not much in their sound that has an obvious grunge influence. There are, however, much more obvious prog tendencies in their sound; it’s a lot more intricate than band like Nirvana and more in common with someone like Tool or even Rush.

Latest Dew Process signings Yves Klein Blue supported and were ok, if maybe a little lightweight as support band for a band like Biffy Clyro. Can’t help but feeling that they’ve got too much of that Libertines, slightly jazz minor 7th thing going on a lot of their songs and that it sounds far too 2002 to make an impact in 2008. They were pretty tight though, so time will tell.

A few more photos on flickr.

Biffy Clyro

Yves Klein Blue