Suburbia Winter Night

Pentax 645D, 645FA 45-85/4.5, tripod
8s, f/5.6, ISO 400
Click image for larger version

I'm having great fun these days. My Pentax dealer has generously let me borrow their Pentax 645D demo-cam for testing, and I'm in the process of going totally bananas with it. So far I have found nothing to dislike about this camera except its price tag. My wallet hurts.

The above shot was obtained last night. Just for the heck of it, I set up the K-7 on another tripod and made a time-lapse of the event. As always, I think of myself as looking ridiculous in front of the camera, but hey. If it gives you a laugh, that's a mission accomplished. This is the first time I try uploading a video to Blogger, so there's a good chance I screw up:

Serously though, the time-lapse thingy is fascinating stuff. It requires some thinking quite different from ordinary stills photography, and yet not quite video shooting either. The technical aspects of it intrigues me. My first attempts has only instilled a very deep respect for those clips you see from BBC, Discovery, NG and their ilk. It's a lot more tricky than I thought, and requires a lot of planning.

Notable mistakes made with this one includes, the "break" in the video where the camera angle changes a little bit, for example. The K-7 can only record 99 frames at a time automatically, so I had to restart the sequence at that point. Guess I must have moved the tripod a little in the process. Normal video has 25 frames per second. This one has only 16,6, so that's where the flicker comes from. You can also see how the camera varies its automatic exposure a little bit from one frame to another. I used Tv exposure mode (shutter priority), but should probably have used M (manual).

Lessons learned, I hope.