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Old 16-11-2012, 09:39 AM
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pmrid (Peter)
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Time Lapse imaging on board ship - anyone got any tips

I'm heading around the tip of Sth America in February/March next year on a large ship and am planning to make the most of what imaging opportunities present themselves along the way.
One I'm thinking about will have to wait until the ship is sailing north - I want to do a time-lapse looking south with the ship's wake and the stars above - hopefully circum-polar - but I have no experience either of time-lapse or imaging on board a moving ship so I was wondering if anyone else had tried this?

Peter
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Old 16-11-2012, 10:23 AM
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Hi Peter,
Awesome idea and it got me thinking ( well actually googeling). I remembered a video clip of how a Charlie Chaplin ( pretty sure it was) scene was shot on a boat. Couldn't find it but here are some modern day ideas.
Obviously you need the cam to be as still as possible. So some sort of gimble/ steadycam rig is needed.
Here are a couple of links I quickly googled ( after failing the Charlie vid)
:
http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/produc...ng_System.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qsl1_pdWkqQ


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mtr8ON90Afc

Even if the video/timelapse is a bit wonky, I believe there are programs out there that can center an object and rework it. Like if taking a vid or shots of say Jupiter is all over the place the software will center it post processing. ( From memory I think JJJ posted a long time ago about this.... I cant find it now)

Hope this helps and gives you some ideas......
Cheers and have an awesome trip ( well when you go of course......next year)
Bartman
Bart
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Old 16-11-2012, 08:40 PM
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Depends on the seas and size of the ship. It can be a relatively smooth ride although around the tip of Sth America I imagine is rough seas.

Some cameras have built in image stabilisation. Some manufacturers put that in the lenses. So perhap trying a lens or camera with image stabilisation.

The latest Nikon lens offering has latest generation of image stabilisation which claims up to 5 stops of improvement. I am sure Canon must be about to release something similar.

Olympus OMD has advanced in camera image stabilisation, Omaroo could comment on how good or otherwise that is.

Greg.
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Old 16-11-2012, 09:18 PM
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What about something like a a Go-Pro video camera. Not sure if they do timelapse, but small, compact and waterproof might be the way to go, especially if you wanted to leave it setup for a while. Saw them on 60minutes last week.

DT
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Old 16-11-2012, 09:28 PM
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Most if not all Alpha series Sony DSLRs have in body stabilisation. My a200 and a77 certainly do.
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Old 17-11-2012, 01:52 AM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by mithrandir View Post
Most if not all Alpha series Sony DSLRs have in body stabilisation. My a200 and a77 certainly do.
I'm keeping it light because of airline baggage limits (flying to Santiago to meet the ship) and the need to carry enough general clobber to last 2 weeks of hob-nobbling on the ship. So IS lenses will be the go. Thanks for the input guys.
Peter
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Old 17-11-2012, 03:00 AM
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The kind of stabilisation in those lenses (though I'm not an expert in that) strikes me as being wholly unsuitable to the kind of stabilisation you want.

A ship moves in three axes - roll, pitch and yaw, while it also heaves, drifts and surges and hogs/sags and will occasionally alter course (heading). Roll is the most pronounced periodic movement, e.g. a 5000T ship rolls (from memory) with a period of ~10 secs through, say, +/- ~5 deg in typical seas though hull design and stabilizers have an effect on amplitude and period/pattern of roll. Larger ships will typically have a slower roll period and smaller amplitude. On a large, stable cruise ship, you may get away with only having to worry about roll, sea-state permitting.

Image stabilisation in a camera lens or body ("anti-shake") operates at a much higher frequency (I think it's typically in the 10Hz range) and smaller amplitude and I doubt that ship movement will even register on a camera system given a frequency factor of the order of 1/100x.

Any accurate pointing system on a ship requires gyro-stabilisation or accelerometer-stabilisation, either being mounted on a stabilised platform or with two-axis drive using differential pointing inputs (commanded direction in bearing and elevation, or alt/az if you prefer,and gyro pitch/roll/heading inputs). (Just for completeness ... electronic beam steering via phased-arrays is also used, but that still needs a gyro input and operates just like a mechanical system in that respect).

Without the above kind of system, I don't know how you'd manage the pointing variation in your images. On particularly calm days, with roll <<1 deg, you might get some useful shots. Possibly you could rig a passive system (hammock style) in one axis only, but it would be imperfect and stabilizers would throw it off a bit, as they can be act out of sync with the near-sinusoidal roll. Plus the ocean tends to have a mind of its own, sometimes.

I suppose manual selection of images from hundreds or thousands would be too time consuming. If someone else has managed to do at-sea timelapse without a stabilised plarform, then I can only think they had especially calm days on a large, stable vessel or that they hand-selected their images, or maybe had some very clever software that did the hard work for them.

I can't really offer you a solution, but perhaps this puts some bounds around the problem.
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Old 17-11-2012, 03:27 AM
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The ship has a reported gross Tonnage of 112000 which hopefully will translate into a somewhat more stable platform - except perhaps in obviously difficult conditions like going 'round the Horn (of through the Straits of Magellan to be more accurate). I guess I'll just have to try to minimise the problems by a combination of a higher ISO, shorter exposures and wider field. It may not work but I'll give it a try just using the camera's built-in intervalometer and manul settings to get as sweet a spot as the conditions will allow. It'll be interesting to try - whatever occurs.
Peter
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