Ghosts In The Stream

The iPhone 6+ is the first iPhone I have really admired as a camera. While many others have been preaching about their iPhone being their camera of choice for years, I never did fully buy into the phenomenon outside of the casual fun of taking and editing photos on the go.

The camera inside the 6+, however, is weirdly smart and capable. After shooting in Seoul and Japan with it this past December it hit me that I had no problem at all choosing the phone as my camera of choice in a handful of situations. I have a couple of writeup’s started in regards to this subject but for now I thought I would share one of my modest video experiments here which was taken with the higher frame rate slow motion feature of the 6+ and edited in iMovie on the phone. The music is from an excellent release from Exist Strategy on BandCamp. Enjoy.

Sunshine At The Lake

Yesterday YoungDoo and I decided to get out of the house for a bit and figured a cup of coffee was a good enough excuse. Upon arriving at the coffee shop we discovered it packed full of people with no where to sit so we went with plan B, a trip to the lake since it just happened to be such a beautiful, sunny day.

The warm yet harsh light of the sun made my images cry in pain as I kept trying my usual tricks, so I decided to push the x-pro1 and see what it could take as I shot into the sunlight. Even when a highlight is totally blown out it handles the light surprisingly well. Those delicate areas right around the blown whites are fairly smooth considering. I did feel the need to shoot/convert to black and white after noticing some chromatic abrasion fringe along my focused edges and the color and tone in general suffered when I pushed exposure too much. The in camera black and white modes proved to be really lovely, of course they only affect the jpg image but still, good enough for my needs at times as RAW is not always a necessity.

The way the direct bursts of sun caught the lens was all to lovely not to quickly switch over to video mode and sneak in a little video recording as we hopped along down the trail. While I will admit a steady cam would be nice sometimes,  I was still happy enough with the way they turned out to spent some time cutting together the two clips I had recorded. I lucked out with the music track by Peter Broderick, ‘For Pop’ because after a little trial and error I managed to get the music to line up perfectly and make for a humble little narrative. Enjoy the video below or click here for a full HD stream.

I don’t know about you, but watching this makes me really happy. Never underestimate how joyful even the simplest of moments in your life really are. It’s so important that we don’t let ourselves loose sight of this.

(Originally created for and shared on my Yesterday Was Only project)

Fall

You may remember I spent some time in Canada recently and on the way back across the border we decided to stop through Niagara Falls because I had never been and it was more or less on the way. Being cold and the off season we had the place more or less to ourselves which was nice but the ice and cold mist did make it hard to explore too much. I took the opportunity to record a bit with my newish iPhone 5s in its slo-mo mode. I chose to reverse the video as well for no reason other than because I could and because it makes it more peaceful somehow. I remembered I had the video today and figured why not add some music and share it with everyone. You can see the clip below or in full HD on Vimeo here.

Interlude

I had the idea to start incorporating video clips into my Yesterday Was Only feed but the theme does not seem to like the idea as much as I did and threw off the nice grid that the theme is built around so I am holding off on the idea until I have time to make it work the way I would like it to. In the mean time here is a video made with the intention of posting there along with yesterdays photos. Just a bit of an ambient break is all. Because I am not a pro user of Vimeo I will have to refer you to the vimeo page if your interested in seeing it in full HD.I will have a couple more desktops up this week for everyone so keep a look out. Until then, enjoy!

EastWestEast

Looks better over on the Vimeo page because they don’t allow HD streaming without a paid account.

Before watching the above video, here is a little background on the idea for those of you interested.

While traveling this past fall with YoungDoo we brought along a ton of cameras and used them all to the best of their ability. With my affinity to film I found myself focusing on shooting with my film cameras but unlike my trip to India I decided to make an extra effort to also get plenty of fun shots with my 5D as well. This amounted to collecting somewhere around 3000 photos in my Aperture library.

I am usually fairly conservative and more guarded with what work I share online these days, no real reason why other than I feel usually I don’t like to show all my cards at once you know? I do end up sharing my favorites all the time but there are often a lot of photos that lay by the wayside for my personal perusal or sharing with friends and family more so than sharing with the big dark scary internet.

That said I really wanted to have a little fun with the digital images taken while YoungDoo was visiting and turn them all into a stop animated video of sorts which is clearly not my idea but I knew it would be fun to try so I have been looking for ways to do this for a long time now. I went through iMovie and a number of demo’s for apps only to be disappointed but upon the opening of the Mac App Store I was pleasantly surprised to find a modestly priced app capable of doing what I needed and after having a go with the demo I jumped in and have finally made the video I set out to make.

The software is kind of tacky and the feature set is heavily limited but their target audience is not for tinkerers like myself so I don’t really mind. It does one thing and it did it well enough for my needs at the moment. For those of you curious the software is called Smoovie… Not a typo. It is actually a really efficient little app that handled the large amount of images thrown at it better than most I tried. The one compromise here was that the images are cropped to a 4:3 aspect ratio which I liked more than a 16:9 ratio of HD. I later added the exported animated movie into iMovie for titles and music and now have this video to share.

The end result ended up so fun for me to watch I knew I wanted to share it with everyone here as well. There are holes in the timeline from the trip as I did use a film camera a lot of the time but you still see a touch of everything we did together. I really hope YoungDoo lets me use all the photos she took on her camera as well and I we will have a short film on our hands hehe. It moves pretty quickly so don’t blink!

Now, as I mention on the Vimeo page for the video I thought that by sharing something like this I could give a closer look into the trip as well as showing everyone a small peak into my casual shooting habits such as how many photos of any given subject I take. Nearly all of these images are straight raw photos as all I did was an export of the entire trip project library. So, without further adieu I will leave you with over a month of photos condensed into four minutes of time at 12 frames a second set to the wonderful music of Shigeto (from his wonderful New Crossings EP). Enjoy!

The Wind

Ironically, thanks to the flash video wars, the video above wont work on the iPhone, I will put up a link when I have it somewhere that does.

I have not come across many opportunities to capture something nice with my new iPhone 4G camera but while I was at work this weekend at a concert in the mountains I looked up above me and saw this long flag slowly blowing around in the wind set against this beautiful sky and pulled out my phone to record for a few seconds before going back to loading a truck full of audio gear.

The thing that caught my eye was the fact that I knew YoungDoo would enjoy its peacefulness and the vibrant blue of the sky so I think it’s good some of her influence has rubbed off on me. Pushing me to find that light sort of peaceful touch in my imagery at times I feel is a good thing because I often gravitate toward the darker, shadowy side of things which is great but too much of it just gets old I think and I love to push myself all the time to learn new methods and approach subjects in new light.

So enjoy the video, I will have some new wallpapers up this week I promise! Also, thanks to everyone who tossed their hat into the ring and claimed one of the prints.

Birdhouse In Your Soul

After posting the last set of desktops I knew I had some video of the same object that I wanted to make into something at some point and so I went ahead and put together the few clips I recorded of it into a short video. Im starting to see a lot of possibility in these short videos because in a sense they are simply moving photographs. This and they are a lot of fun to create. The only thing I could complain about here is maybe that I was shooting at too high of an ISO so its a bit grainy but still I thought it was pretty nice footage and could not wait to throw something together to share. I hope you enjoy it!

Falling Up

New video! I have to admit I really love making these videos, short clips from wherever I can manage to record them. My previous two from India found a lot of love from my readers and I was excited to make a new one at some point to share. This time around I had access to a high definition camera for the first time ever, a Canon 5D MarkII and I am thrilled with the results and can not wait to eventually have one of my own.

On a random grey day here in my apartment in Seoul big snowflakes started to slowly drift down from the sky and so I took advantage of being seven floors up and captured video of the snow falling from a number of different angles and this ended up being my favorite, very straight forward and subtle. The snow drifting through the focal point halfway to the street which is blurred in a wash of bokeh below and during this take one single person wandered through the shot and ended up acting as a ghost in my snowy mini movie. Another hypnotic moment slightly altered to bring a bit of mystery to the table and I hope you all enjoy it. You can see it in full HD over on the Vimeo page, apparently I’m not allowed to embed HD video unless I am a plus member I think.

Edit: Also, on a related note, there was a video from a while back made by YoungDoo where she reversed the fall of the snow and I loved it at the time and I was reminded of it after I made this and posted it and I wanted to add link to it for those of you who liked this video I think you will love hers as well, just beautiful!

Music is from Four Tet, a great song from his wonderful new album.

Waiting

While waiting for a train in India I recorded this moment with my iPhone where so much happened in such a short time. A cow walking by, vendors pushing carts, someone walking down the tracks, not to mention all of the various people in the windows and doors of the train. It was just perfect. So I slowed the whole thing down to take it all in slowly and I find it pretty hypnotizing.