Arts and Photography

Cameras can be used for more than just taking simple shots. They have a lot of other creative uses, one such use I like to use my camera for is using it as a movie camera. Now, I don't mean using the movie camera feature on the camera (if your camera even has it), but I mean using the camera to take an image, then to adjust that image, and take it again and so on. You can do this with any camera.

Great examples of this are time lapse photography, where you set your camera up overlooking a scene and take photos every few minutes for a long period of time, and then bring these photos together and make a video out of it. These are quite spectacular and wonderful when you get it right.

When I first started out doing this sort of thing, I played around a lot, and made some fun stuff. My first attempt was setting my camera up on a tripod and then took photos of a table, moving it a few inches at a time and then photographing it. When I brought the images together and then made them into a video, I had a humorous video of a table traveling along.

But my favorite video was when I took images of writing on a white board. This was really good, because I set the whole thing up in one room where I was able to control the light and environment, so nothing changed.

Firstly, I had a clean white board. My camera was set up on a tripod, where it would stay for the entire shoot. I then set my camera to M (manual) mode, and I adjusted the shutter speed, ISO and f stops to suit the environment. These stayed the same throughout the shoot.

The next stage was the fun part. I took my first few shots of the empty white board, and then began writing on the board. I would write half a letter, take the shot, return, complete the letter, take the shot and continue throughout until I had the phrase I was aiming for. In this case, I was writing a message to my step son on his white board.

Once I had completed the shoot, I imported all my shots onto my PC, and then used the professional version of Quicktime to sequence all the images. Once saved, I was able to then open it in a regular video editing program to add captions, effects and so on. From there I saved it as an avi file, but of course, at this point you can save it in whatever format you like.

This type of photography is very powerful, and you can turn it onto whatever subject you like. It's best to start off simple and shoot in conditions that you can control tightly, before moving onto something more complex.

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