For a while, I've had the idea to take a series of HDR pictures and string them together to create a video. You might find my first attempt at this a little bit laughable. (I find it a little bit laughable.) Yet, I take it for what it is -- a first attempt. While such things should probably be hidden and not really shared, I'm putting it out there anyway as a starting point. A lesson teacher. I've got a lot to learn.
Here are some of the lessons that I've learned in the course of making this video.
Lesson 1 -- From start to finish, I spent about 15 minutes taking these photos. It seemed like forever! (Ha, ha, lesson 1... this stuff takes a while!)
Lesson 2 -- Having set the camera to autobracketing mode, I was firing off 3 shots (3 different exposures) every few seconds or so. I ended up with a little over 300 image files, which gets processed down to 100 frames of HDR pictures.
Lesson 3 -- I've learned this lesson before, but there are times in autobracketing mode when my Sony NEX-7 will not shoot the darkest exposure. I'm pretty sure that I've had it shoot the zero twice. This time, I ended up with a range in the darkest exposures going from minus .3 to minus .7 to minus 1. As the setting became darker, the exposures shifted, although I never got the full minus 3 that the camera had been set to take in the automatic mode.
Lesson 4 -- In order to get a truer dark exposure (in the hopes that this would give greater depth to the image), I manually generated a darkest exposure by taking those minus .3s and .7s and 1s over to the Image Data Converter program that came with the camera. This program has a feature in which you can take RAW image files and edit them, and then you can also save them again as RAW image files. Before I put myself to the trouble of doing this 100 times, I should have tested one to see if the resulting picture was noticeably better in my generated version than it was using the files that came directly from the camera. (Perhaps next time...)
Lesson 5 -- 100 frames of pictures gave me a little over 15 seconds of video.
Lesson 6 -- When your video only has 15 seconds of photo content, you might be better off finding a way to squeeze the titles and credits down to less than the length of your actual content. It reminds me of something that was said to me, when I was eating French Fries and would squeeze out a pile of ketchup. Someone would invariably ask: "Would you like some fries to go with your ketchup?" Here, it's: "Would you like some content to go with your credits?"
Lesson 7 -- In the hopes that people might be a little bit more forgiving of the said 15 seconds of video (and the 37 seconds of titles/credits), I mention the fact that there is only 15 seconds of actual video footage in the title.
Lesson 8 -- Even though the camera remained in the exact same spot the whole time I was taking pictures, it is more than obvious from the resulting footage that there was some kind of movement going on with the camera throughout the process. Maybe I could find a way to mitigate this by setting the tripod up on a sturdier surface.
Lesson 9 -- The batch processing feature on Photomatix 5 is really handy for this kind of project. It takes a little while, but - once everything is ready to go, it is really handy. I took one set of exposures and adjusted the settings in Photomatix until I was satisfied with the results. Then, I saved the preset and went into the batch processing and applied the same setting for each set of exposures. (For a future project, I could see going through and individually processing each of the frames differently. It would take a while, but it might give the project an interesting sense of variety.)
Lesson 10 -- To round out my lessons, I'm sure that there is more to learn and more to pick up along the way. If you've experimented with this kind of thing, drop me a note in the comments. I'd be interested to hear what you've learned.
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