Sam O’Hare is developing quite a reputation for his tilt-shift, miniature faking videos. O’Hare is the same guy that created The Sandpit, a beautiful tilt-shift video of New York City that has been watched nearly 2 million times. He was recently commissioned by the Coachella Music Festival to create a similar video for Coachella 2010, and the resulting video (shown above) is just as stunning.
It was created using the Nikon D3s, with 4 frames captured every second for the day shots and exposure times of up to 2 seconds per shot for night shots. Roughly 50,000 still images were captured, and the tilt-shift effect was added in post. There’s a pretty informative interview with O’Hare that discusses this new video here.
Shukhrat of MINIMUS DESIGN created this time-lapse video of his favorite places in San Francisco, using a tilt-shift effect to make them look like miniature models. It reminds me of “The Sandpit“, a similar video done in New York City that went viral on the web back in February.
If you don’t have the $2,500 needed to rent a Phantom camera for a day but would like to have super slow motion in your videos, you can fake the effect using special software designed for the task. The above video by Oton Bačar was recorded on a Canon 7D at 60 frames per second, but was slowed down to mimic 1000fps in After Effects with Twixtor, a plugin that allows you to speed up or slow down footage smoothly. It uses warping and interpolation to provide smooth results, avoiding the choppiness that you see when you play normal video back in “slow motion”.
Too bad Twixtor is still pretty pricey — a license will set you back a few hundred bucks. Does anyone know of any cheaper alternatives?
Last week when Reuters released photographs of the volcanic activity at Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland, one photograph stood out to Wade Laube, the photo editor of The Sydney Morning Herald.
After making a few calls, Reuters decided to investigate. Laube writes on his blog,
Reuters had made contact with the photographer, an Icelandic local, and sought access to the original. It transpired that before being acquired by the wire service, the photograph had been in the possession of an Icelandic newspaper and it was there that some fairly liberal digital dodging and burning took place. When a comparison was made with the original, it became obvious that post production had been applied to sufficient extent that it violated Reuters’ very firm position on digital enhancement. So they retracted the picture and supplied the original in its place, and we dropped that image into the Herald for later editions.
Looking at the before and after photographs shown above, you can see that post-processing was done in order to make the plume of ash look extremely dramatic.
What are your thoughts on how far post-processing can go before it becomes too much?
