The Glidetrack allows you to make smooth dolly or truck moves. In contrast to pans, tilts or zoom, the camera is actually moving, which is like taking the viewer on a physical ride and give the video are more natural and organic feeling. The dolly move is a movement towards or away from the subject without changing the focal length of the lens (combining a dolly move with a zoom is of course also possible). A move in can be used to combine a wide shot of a scene with a tighter shot and to focus the viewer’s attention to the subject in dynamic way. The truck move (also referred to as a tracking shot) is a sideways (left or right) movement. By changing the viewpoint it can give the viewer a better experience of the three-dimensional space of the scene or slowly reveal new information. The truck move is most effective with foreground objects.

Pi in Almere City from Harald Walker on Vimeo.

For my short test video I went to the parking garage in the center of Almere. Next to the parking garage the number PI has been painted in large white characters on the ground. I brought my Nikon D300S as well as the Sigma 17-70mm f/2.8-4.5 DC and Sigma 30mm f/1.4 EX DC HSM lenses. As video head I used the Manfrotto 700RC2 mini video fluid head. In order to transport the Glidetrack Shooter with the rest of the equipment per bicycle I had to dismantle it again, so you have to watch those screws and bring tools to put it together.

After a few tryouts I quickly got a feel for it for the Glidetrack and the movement of the carriage. It is important to push the carriage, not the camera. When the load is not shared evenly across the bearings, it can result in uneven running. You can see it the video at 00:52. In this scene the camera was titled down to film the sign.
As I was using my regular DSLR camera I had a silly practical problem with the straps, which often got in the way when moving the camera. Nothing to worry about, I just have to pay more attention. I didn’t use this Glidetrack as shoulder support yet but am very pleased so far with the build quality and the first video result. I am certainly looking forward to using it more often.

Next to taking pictures and recording 720p HD video, the camera can also be used to record timelaps videos, even if doesn’t have interval shooting or the possibility to use a remote control with timer. Since this camera doesn’t have a mirror like DSLR cameras, shooting thousands of photos for a timelaps video is not going to hurt the camera (I am always worried when I use my Nikon for it). I will show in this blog entry how to do it. This will probably work with other point-and-shoot camera’s as well.

The Lumix has an unlimited burst mode which will shoot until the memory card is full or the battery is empty. The speed depends on the picture size and quality and results in approximately 1-2 pictures per second (which might decelerate over time).

The unlimited burst mode is available in ‘Normal’ and ‘Intelligent Auto’ mode. The focus is fixed when the first picture is taken but exposure and white balance are being adjusted with each picture, which might cause flickering.

I usually choose as aspect ratio 16:9 and pick the lowest resolution of 2M EZ, which results in images of 1920 x 1080 pixels, the same as the 1080P video resolution. On a 2 GB card there is enough space for about 1800 pictures in high JPEG quality. So theoretically on a 16 GB card there would be enough storage for a timelaps video of about 2 – 4 hours if the battery lasts that long (I never tried it for such a long time).

As I edit most of my videos in 720P it leaves enough room to zoom or pan within the timelaps video. If you edit in 1080P you might want to choose a higher resolution.

Since the DMC-TZ7 doesn’t offer a way to connect a remote control and we don’t want to press the shutter button all the time, I am using some household tools to keep the button pressed.

On the photo above you can see it on a small Gorillapod. I have also used it on a flat surface but generally it is better to use a tripod if you don’t want to mess it up.

Once the pictures have been transferred to the computer, we can create the timelaps movie. Collect all pictures which belong to one timelaps sequence in one folder. Now on the Mac start QuickTime Player 7 (Snow Leopard users can find this older version in their Utilities folder), select ‘Open Image Sequence…’ in the file menu and select the first image of the sequence. Select how many frames per second to use. As I am in Europe and usually produce videos for the web I choose 25 frames per second (you can always speed it up or slow it down in the editor).

You can now save this move as ‘self-contained movie’ or export it using your preferred video format and use this clip in your video editor software like Final Cut Pro.

The video below shows some example timelaps scenes taken with the DMC-TZ7.

DMC-TZ7 Timelaps from Harald Walker on Vimeo.

Using a cheap or maybe old point-and-shoot camera instead of your DSLR for this has the advantage that you could leave it behind while it is taking pictures without worrying too much.

The plugin requires at least PHP 5.2, cURL, simplexml and WordPress 2.9 or higher. In order to verify if you have the correct PHP version with cURL and simplexml support, you can create a simple PHP page with the following code: <?php phpinfo() ?>

After entering the Photoshelter credentials the ‘Add Photoshelter photo’ button on the edit post and page screen can be used. It directly displays a list of all galleries in chronological order.

It is not possible to search for galleries or sort them by name but you can use the search function of the browser instead. For people with a large amount of galleries this might be an issue though.

A gallery can be embedded only as Flash based slideshow in the post or page, which is not really great for SEO and neither for visitors using mobile devices without Flash support like the iPhone or iPad. I am currently working on a Flash free Photoshelter based slideshow (you can see the first prototype already on my homepage) and with the NiO PhotoShelter RSS Gallery Widget it is possible to show the images of a gallery as thumbnails.

In order to insert a single image into a post or page the user can either search by keyword or display the images of a gallery. The search supports multiple keywords and by default it is an ‘any’ search. Use “&” to find images that contain both keywords and “-” to exclude a keyword.

The user can now pick an image, set the width and has two ways to embed the image in the post or page, either as regular HTML image or as flash object. Both solutions are linking directly to the image page of the Photoshelter gallery.

When using the HTML option, the IPTC image description/caption including copyright notice is being used for ALT text of the embedded image. This is the information that Google indexes and displays on the Google Image search results page. The title or headline of the image is unfortunately not being used. The embedded image also automatically includes the Photoshelter watermark (if enabled).

This is fine for larger sizes but is not something I like on small versions, especially since the watermark does not scale. I would prefer to have this as an option or be able to provide a smaller watermark.

Another issue is the JPEG compression rate of this image. The resized version of the 300 pixel wide image of the example is 62 KB large because it uses the highest quality settings. Of course we want provide the best image quality to our customers but photos which are being displayed on a web-page should be size optimized. In this case the image size can be reduced to at least 25 KB without a visible loss of quality.

The Flash object version includes a bright BUY button and an extra copyright notice.

I thought that the icon on the bottom left looked like it might display more information such as the caption but it didn’t. Personally I prefer the html image solution but would like to see options for the watermark and JPEG compression.

In general the integration between WordPress and Photoshelter is working well and the plugin is easy to use but because of the watermark issue and JPEG compression I probably won’t be using it yet.

The plugin has been released under a GPL license and it available for free on the official PhotoShelter WordPress plugin page.

Update:

I have added the option to disable the watermark and ‘buy’ button and included the display of the image title when the mouse pointer moves over the image.

Click here to get the modified php file. I have also submitted this change to Photoshelter.

My first adaptation was a green vegan ‘V’ for a Vegalicious T-Shirt in the center of the QR Code, which links to Vegalicious. The next design used a red heart icon in the same pixel style as the QR Code. When someone scans this QR Code it will display a text message.

The next example links the icon of Creative Commons to their home page and the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license QR Codes to the BY-NC-SA license deed page. This is an easy way to provide a link back to the license page on a visual medium like a record cover, a printed book or a piece of art.

QR Code is a registered trademark of Denso Wave Corp.

The new template I am using for Mediasculp is the F8 theme, one of the Graph Paper Press templates which are based on the popular Modularity theme. The first place for a RSS Gallery was the ‘inside’ area of the theme, which slides open when the visitor clicks on ‘View Work’. Originally the latest blog posts are being displayed here, but those are also being shown on the second half of the homepage. So I edited the inside.php file and replaced the code for the blog posts with Johan’s widget code. The second place for a small RSS gallery was the sidebar, which is being displayed on regular blog post and pages. Here I wanted to show the thumbnails of the recently sold photographs. An option would have been to hard-code the widget in the sidebar.php file as well, but I followed Johan’s suggestion to implement it using a text widget, which makes it easier to update the theme if necessary.

The widget is currently being tested by a handful of Photoshelter users and will be made available for download in the future. It is already a great tool for photographers to promote their work and automatically keep their website up-to-date.

Saale-Unstrut-Triasland from Harald Walker on Vimeo.

The Unstrut and Saale rivers, dry grasslands, vineyards, fruit orchards, wild orchids, castles, monasteries, charming old villages and extensive forests, characterize the nature park Saale-Unstrut-Triasland. Although there is something to for everyone to discover and experience, this region is still fairly unknown among tourists.

Visit the photo gallery of the Nature Park Saale-Unstrut-Triasland.

Zoneiland Almere – Images by Harald Walker

La Defense in Netherlands