Pre-selected shoot locations include a photo studio in Vancouver, space in Langley, rooftop shoot downtown Vancouver, or a location of your choice (within reason and driving distance agreed upon by all participants beforehand). Winner will select three final photos to be retouched and will receive these as high resolution files on disc or by email. Must be redeemed within six months of winning.

A second place winner will receive a $100 gift certificate towards any of my photography packages (must be redeemed within three months of winning), as well as a $25 gift certificate courtesy of The Keg.

A third place winner will receive a $50 gift certificate towards any of my photography packages (must be redeemed within three months of winning), as well as a $50 gift certificate good for any Vancity Original products available at Dipt (getdipt.com).

HOW TO ENTER
There are two ways to enter:
• Like ‘Ryan West Photo’ on Facebook (facebook.com/ryanwestphoto) and leave a comment “I’m entered to win a deluxe photoshoot”
• Follow me @ RyanWestPhoto on Twitter and tweet the following sentence: “I’m entered to win a photoshoot with #Vancouver #photographer @RyanWestPhoto with makeup by @MakeupInfusion”

RULES AND CONDITIONS
• The contest will run for two weeks from Monday, November 28th to Monday, December 12th. Entries will be accepted until midnight on December 12th
• The winners will be drawn randomly and announced on my blog, Twitter, and Facebook page
• I will contact the winners and if I don’t get a response within 24 hours, a new winner will be randomly drawn
• There will be no prize substitutions and it cannot be redeemed for cash. If the winner chooses to forfeit the prize, no compensation will be given

** UPDATE – WINNERS ANNOUNCED!
‎Congrats to the grand prize winner Krystal Kohan! As well as the second place winner – Kate Crutchlow, and third place winner – Esther Cohen! I will contact you guys soon.

Also special thank you to my sponsors – Makeup Infusion, Jo’s Toes & Esthetics, Lang Hairstyling, the Keg, and Dipt!

This is very handy for yourself or clients to check fine details like hair flyaways or checking shadow detail or reflections, etc. If it’s a commercial shoot or you’re putting a lot of time into it then it’s best to get it right the first time checking the details rather than just relying on the cameras display which can often be misleading.

Now myself I like to move around and shoot at different angles, perhaps shoot from up top or down low so I really dont like using a cable. That’s when I searched for a wireless option and this video shows what I use (Eye-Fi Pro X2). You can click here to see the company’s website. If you’ve been thinking of starting to shoot tethered I hope this helps!

Ryan

For example, if you wanted to capture the sunset but have it shown in a few seconds rather than its normal time you would record a frame (picture) every few secs or mins and then compile all the pictures back together to create a stop motion type effect and thus appear to speed up time.

I think the best way to describe it is not at all, but to show you:

So here you see the sunset from the perspective of my place. I forget the exact details, but I think that was a picture every 8 seconds over a period of about 45 mins. And in the final clip we see the sunset in only 13 seconds for a pretty cool effect.

Ok, so you’d like to try it? First, you’ll need a few things – a tripod, a camera with an Aperture priority or Manual setting, an intervalometer, and some video editing software …and of course, something interesting that you want to time-lapse!

Quick note: If you use Auto settings it will keep changing to get a “correct” exposure and we don’t want that, so use Manual or Aperture priority. Also be sure to manually focus your shot so your camera isn’t constantly trying to focus on each new shot. As well, one thing I like to do is have a bit of motion blur (if the scene has moving objects) in each shot to add to the effect, so adjust your camera settings to taste.

The next step is to do some math.. don’t worry it’s not that hard. Standard TV/video is shot at 30 frames per second (fps).. so figure out what length of FINAL video you want. Let’s say 15 secs for our example. So 30 fps x 15 secs = 450 frames (pictures) that we will need in total.

Next, how long of a period of time are you covering? Let’s say for our sunset example we want to cover 30 mins. Then we convert 30 mins into seconds (30×60=1800 secs), which we divide by the total frames we need… so 1800 / 450  = 4 secs.

So we need a picture every 4 secs until we have 450 pictures. Now, remember you want the camera on a tripod so the picture isn’t shaky and all the pictures line up. Also you could take a picture by pressing the shutter release every 4 seconds but that would get pretty boring really quick…. so that’s where the intervalometer comes in. This cool little device will do this tedious job for you. I got mine off ebay for about 30 bucks. Check them out here.

Ok, so now you have 450 pictures or so and you’ve loaded them onto your computer. The next step is to compile them into video editing software. Use whichever program you’re comfortable with. Myself, I find QuickTime Pro really easy for this.

In QuickTime I go to “File – Open Image Sequence” and then choose the first picture. I usually keep the frame rate at 30 but you could go lower for more effect. If your files are numbered sequentially QuickTime will compile them in the proper order. This will take a few minutes and then you’ll want to export it as a video file “File – Export” which you can save to a number of different formats. I typically save as .MOV files with either H.264 or Photo-jpeg compression.

And there you go, hopefully your first time-lapse! I hope this helped you, and feel free to leave a comment or question.

Cheers,

Ryan

p.s. here’s a couple others to get you inspired!