Erik's Blog

I’ve been playing around lately in After Effects, which is more or less “Photoshop for Video”. After Apple’s dumbing down of iMovie (Apple dumbed something down? Imagine that!) last year, it’s refreshing to get back to editing videos with an actual timeline and keyframes.

Our little primate specimen decided that everyone should be up and active at 7:30 AM every day this week, so I’ve seen every sunrise so far. Monday’s was beautiful, but I just enjoyed it without recording it. On Tuesday, I actually got out the camera and recorded the area of the horizon where the sun appears. And on Wednesday and today the sky was gray and boring for the sunrise.
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Last week a sprout of grass sticking out of a bricked town square caught my eye, particularly the shadows it made, so I took a picture of it with my iPhone camera. I liked the photo so much that I decided it might make a worthy subject for a real camera outing, so some days later I took a few more photographs. What’s really sad is that the sunlight in these photos is from noon. That’s how low the sun is in the sky, and how long the shadows are, these days.

Feel free to make your own profound metaphor about Nature resiliently fighting back against human Urban Progress. Or don’t.
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What happens when a photographer walks around town on a windy and sunny day with, not a still camera, but a video camera? Photographs…that move.

On my walk yesterday I had quite a few American Beauty moments¹ where something as simple as a flower dancing in the wind made me stop and admire Nature. When I filmed the first few clips, I didn’t know how I would put them together, but by about the fifth one, the idea for this video was formed.
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I’ve been wanting to make this particular timelapse video for a long, long time. Oddly enough, it was a Viagra commercial I saw the other day that played a candle burning in reverse (obvious imagery) that made me finally decide to do it. I used some birthday candles that we’ve been using for Nora’s birthday parties, which, by chance, are “sparkler” candles that not only relight themselves when extinguished, but also send off sparks every so often. The camera was set to take a photograph every three seconds, so the majority of the sparks were missed, but several of them where captured. What surprised me about them was the obvious rotation of the burning projectiles, resulting in squiggly lines of fire in the photographs. Behold!
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Last night at eleven o’clock our power went out. I’m unfortunately accustomed to this because our circuit breaker is incredibly weak and about twice a month flips to the off position out of sheer laziness. So I got up to flip it back on, but it was already in the on position. It was at that point that I noticed how dark it was outside the window. After fumbling through the darkness towards the window, I looked out into the blackness. It had been raining with low clouds all day, and there was no light reflecting off the clouds from Colindres, nor from nearby Laredo or Santoña. The entire region was blacked out!
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This is quite possibly the creepiest blog post I’ve ever posted, at least on a personal level. I’ve always known I would do this, and my regular readers might share in my surprise that it’s taken me so long to do it. Yesterday, in a curiosity-fueled effort to speculate on what Nora might look like as an adult, I morphed my face with my wife’s. Morphing is always creepy, and even more so when it is done with faces that you know very well.
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My sister-in-law has been begging me to make this photoshop construction for a long time. Finally on Saturday I took the pictures, and today I spent a disturbingly small amount of time (< 5 minutes) photoshopping two photos together.

One interesting thing that I discovered in this endeavor was that it’s really hard to move a 7 kg weight from one side of your body to the other without drastically changing your posture. On the photos with Nora on her right, her hips were exaggeratedly to her left, and vice versa.
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The point of high dynamic range (HDR) imaging is to, via post-processing, more accurately capture the wide range of colors and tones that the human eye sees as it saccades around the scene. Current camera photon sensing technology is just not as good as the human eye at capturing a wide range of light levels. The typical procedure involves taking three or more photographs of the same subject, with minimal camera movement, at various exposure levels, e.g. one where the shadows are underexposed, one where the highlights are overexposed, and another middle range. Then, using a computer program, the images are aligned and the detail from the shadows in one exposure is combined with the details of the highlights of another exposure, thus giving you detail across a wide range of light levels.
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Come with me on a journey across the galaxy to the small forested planet of Citronia. In the spirit of the early Apollo missions, we won’t actually be landing on the surface, just some orbital reconnaissance. This planet certainly has some nice beaches…
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Last year, I took you on a walk up to Colindres de Arriba. Recently I took my camera up there for another stroll. This time, however, I was armed with some close-up lenses to get even closer to the plants and wildlife. Let’s go for a photographic stroll, shall we?
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