Last weekend, the inaugural Arizona Balloon Classic took place at Wild Horse Pass in Chandler. Not really Wild Horse Pass, but a place called Rawhide. From their site:

>Witness more than 50 hot air balloons take flight both morning and night on November 18, 19 and 20 at Rawhide in Chandler, Arizona.* Don’t miss this unique visual spectacle during the perfect time of year.

50 is more than a bit of a stretch. The actual count on Sunday was closer to 12, and not a single one of them was there at sunrise. A fact I am supremely confident with since we were there at sunrise.

Once the balloons did show up, it was pretty amazing. I’ve never seen anything like this before, at least not up close and personal. Standing right next to each balloon as it was filled with hot air from propane torches that resembled rocket engines was awesome.

The main reason for us going was to snap some photos and video of the balloons, which I did using pretty much all of my gear.

That was shot with my Canon, which couldn’t be in the shot because it was busy taking the shot. Shots that can be seen in my Flickr stream.

And there is video. This video is comprised of video from my the The Flip Mino and Canon HF100. I was going to do some iPhone video in there, but decided against using a 3rd video camera because that’s just silly.

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I’ve always been fascinated with stop motion animation (remember Gumby?) and time lapse photography. Since I do not have the time to make clay bits move about, photography is more my speed.

It’s really simple. Find what you want to shoot, set the focus, set the invalometer to the desired time and walk away. Come back to a either a dead battery or full CF card (yes, my camera is old. Let it go) and transfer them in. The video above was created from over 500 shots taken every 3 seconds.

I have a photoshop action that I use to resize the images to 720p, bring them into Google Picasa (yes, on the Mac), set the frame rate and turn ‘er loose! Once I have a completed movie, I can edit again in iMovie (to add sound or mix it with something else), which I have done here.

As a bonus, this one is short enough that I was able to post it to my Flickr stream, something I haven’t updated in months!

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A New Tool for my Bag

This week, I picked this up at Amazon, a Shoot remote timer that works with my camera. It allows for timing of the shutter release at just about any interval you can imagine. Set it to start shooting in X seconds or minutes and continue to shoot every X seconds or minutes until X photos have been shot. Or, shoot until you run out of space on your memory card or the battery in your camera dies. Automatically. As a bonus, this also works as a standard remote shutter release. Even without batteries, this feature works.

Then it was time to study up on best practices for doing time-lapse photography. For those of you that don’t know what time-lapse is:

Time-lapse photography is a cinematography technique whereby the frequency at which film frames are captured (the frame rate) is much lower than that which will be used to play the sequence back. When replayed at normal speed, time appears to be moving faster and thus lapsing. For example, an image of a scene may be captured once every second, and then played back at 30 frames per second; the result would be an apparent increase of speed by 30 times. Time-lapse photography can be considered to be the opposite of high speed photography.

via wikipedia.

History lesson out of the way, I started reading up on the best way to set up my camera. As you can see in the sample below, I still have some work to do, but I’m getting close.

This was shot over the course of about 90 minutes in the heat of the Arizona sun. The camera used was my Canon Rebel XT capturing the photos in jpeg. The timer was set for 20 second intervals which created 145 photographs.

I created a custom action in Photoshop to process the photos. It did some minor color correction (but not enough), image and canvas resizing and some cropping. I fired it up and about 10 minutes later I had a batch of photos ready to put into a time-lapse film.

I used iMovie ’11 this time, but I can tell you from previous experience that Picasa does a better job. Sure there are specialized apps that do this for you, quite nicely, but my budget doesn’t allow for such things.

In iMovie, the shortest interval I was able to set the photos to display at was .1 of a second. That is 10 frames per second. In Picasa, you can set it to pretty much any duration you want, and then import that into iMovie for further editing. We’ll talk more about Picasa later.

Next time I do this for a short interval like this I will be shooting in raw instead of jpeg so I can process the photos better if needed. I also need to pay better attention to the aperture and shutter speeds, which is to say that it’s time for me to become a real photographer, paying attention and learning what f-stops are and how to actually use my camera in full manual mode, not just aperture priority.

I’m pretty excited for everything I’m going to be able to use this for. I’ll be posting more of these in YouTube channel and on Vimeo as I do them.

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I was reminded about this, yet again, with the latest ‘notes’ meme circling through Facebook. I’m also reminded that Facebook Notes aren’t the greatest platform for publishing. I’m also reminded that Facebook notes also aren’t a good platform if you want to share anything you write with friends that aren’t on Facebook or not your Facebook friends.

Enter Tumblr. For those of you that follow me on Facebook, you already know that I use Tumblr quite a bit. In fact, it’s what is powering wind(the)frog(dot)net and has been for the past 3 years and change.

At first, I used Tumblr as an aggregator of everything I did online (see this page as an example). It allowed me to bring in the RSS feeds from a bunch of things and combine them into one. For that, it worked amazing.

Now, I’m using it more as my personal blog and collection of random crap I find on the internet. And for that it works equally amazing. One of the features that makes that easy is the bookmarklet that you drag to your browsers bookmark toolbar. When you find something you want to share, you click that and click post. Done and done.

It also has settings that will automatically send your posts to Facebook or share them on Twitter. When you share on Facebook, your posts show up in a way that is very similiar to Notes. Your friend can still click (or not) to view the entire post. But, when you post that stuff in Tumblr, you can share it with people that aren’t on Facebook or aren’t your Facebook friends.

I talked about it in the last video blog. Jump ahead to 1:45 to get started.

Tumblr is free and easy to use and does so much more than I’m telling you about today. If you are looking for a way to start a blog that you can easily share with anyone you like easily, then set up a Tumblr. Sure you can do this with WordPress or Blogger, but Tumblr makes it easy. tumblr.com.

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Geek stuff explained, I shall continue.

Earlier this week, Verizon Wireless started pushing the 2.2 update for the Dinc. I thought I’d wait, but then I found this at Android Central and said to myself “how hard could it be?”.

And it wasn’t. Total time was about 15 minutes and it went without a hitch. And I’m very glad I did it!

First up the Dinc is now considerably faster. Places where there would a little bit of screen lag (like when scrolling through the photo gallery) are now smoother. Games open faster and perform better. Internet pages seem to open a bit faster as well.

Another bonus is the updates to the camera. The photo camera is much faster when taking photos and resetting. The video camera now records up to 720p.

(be sure to select the 720p option)

It’s not going to replace my Canon HF100, but for something I carry in my pocket it’s more than acceptable. I don’t think I’m going to stop using the The Flip either, since it has better sound and doesn’t suck away battery from my communication device when I use it.

Speaking of battery life, it is also better. Still not able to go a full day on a charge in the field, but I am able to go until 2 instead of 1. For sure I’m going to be picking up a 1750mah battery for this. I’m sure that will give me a solid 12 hours of my normal use, which I really need.

Other changes that I have noticed in Froyo include an update to the messaging app, making it slightly more streamlined, update to the app manager, making it super easy to move apps to the SD card or from the SD card to the phone or, or, or.

If you are running the Dinc, this update will suit you fine. If you haven’t gotten it OTA yet, follow the link above to do it yourself. You’ll be glad you did.

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Really not too bad. This will improve once Froyo is released, bumping video resolution to 720p among other features*. Enough about this, here is what I think so far, keeping in mind that I have used an Android phone prior; The Motorola Droid.

• Size/form factor is perfect for my hands. It is very close to the iPhone 3gs in this respect and much better than the Moto Droid with it’s ‘chin’
• Speed. This phone is wicked fast so far.
• Sense UI. The Moto had stock android which I liked. The Incredible is running the latest version of the HTC Sense UI which I love. The keyboard is much better with this form factor and it works well. Predictive text has been fairly accurate so far and it learns quickly. And the scenes feature, allowing you to setup 7 home screens per, gives unlimited amounts of customizing.
• The screen. I don’t think I’ve got the AMOLED screen, but it doesn’t matter. It’s very sharp and easy to read. Touch works like you expect it to as well.
• Phone calls sound fantastic from both ends.

This photo take with the Droid

It’s not all perfect however. These are minor things I’ve noticed so far that kinda bug me.

• Skype will not work if the WiFi radio is on. I know it doesn’t use WiFi on VZW, but to make me turn WiFi off is a pain in the arse.
• There is a button, joystick style, at the bottom of the device. So far I have no idea what it does or why it’s even there.
• Making calls. If I’m honest, there are too many options. I’m still playing with it.
• No in-phone video editing. I have no idea why nobody has done this and am guessing when Froyo is more widely available this might get some attention.

So far, everything you have read or heard about this phone is 100% spot on. It’s the right size and shape, it’s fast and the HTC Sense UI on Android is a great combination. If you are on Verizon Wireless and don’t want a phone the size of your navigation device, I highly recommend it.

*Froyo is bringing 720p video recording, WiFi hotspot, faster speed with a new JIT compiler and chrome-to-phone among others.

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How-to: Blog

From my YouTube channel, if you like that sort of thing.

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I’ve been busy over on the other side lately, so be sure you are following along over there. There is some very cool stuff coming in the next month and change that is MINI related and I’m pretty excited about all of it.

I’m also going to making some changes (again) to this site. No matter how hard I try, no matter how many resumes I send out, I just can’t seem to make anything happen. So it’s time to take off on my own and try to generate some income anyway possible. I need a website that reflects that.

What does that mean to you? I’m not sure yet. Of course it will be cool, but that might mean that I move my more ‘personal’ blog posts over w(t)f and keep this more technical, which I’ve already started.

Anyway, go to the MINI sites and see what’s happening. If you are in SoCal, stop by and say hi when I’m at MINI of Ontario or catch me at AMVIV with almost the entire WRR crew.

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As mentioned, I’m going to try to put this both on Viddler and YouTube for those of you still using iPhones. YouTube version coming soon.

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