While watching Manchester United crush Arsenal in todays big game at Old Trafford I also spent some time digging my street photography archives.

I came across two interesting shots, kind of the same situation, still so different. The similarity is obvious, people in need, begging for your help by donating money to them. I often find myself feeling bad about not contributing and helping more when I come across situations like this, however the approach of the needing is what really struck me as a huge difference among these two unfortunate as well.

One of the images shows a man, half sitting / half lying on the streets of Prague, Czech Republic. I was sitting, waiting around for a fellow photographer when I first got aware of him. I heard strange words in a “not to welcoming tonal range” being throwed around at the people passing him. I have no idea what he actually said, however my intepretation told me it was not the kindest words and a clear projection of his feelings about the people passing and not willing to share. On the other hand, this is just my intepretation…but it made me alert and I would not feel comfortable approaching him to offer anything.

The other image shows an old man captured in a town called Óia on Santorini, Greece. Me, clearly being biased by documentary images seen earlier by smiling, welcoming and sincere looking greek people, felt like I was in the middle of one of those shots/situations. He was sitting in an old staircase on the way to a tourist lookout terrace where people come to watch the magnificent sunsets of Óia. His face was sincere, he seemed to be a good man and his smile made feel welcome, even though I´m proplably the 50 zilliointh tourist invading his home town. I approached him, gesturing I wanted to take his picture, he reached out his hand and opened his palm to say that I he wanted money for it. I was more than happy to reach into my pocket and hand him whatever I found. Even though I only had a few coins he was cool with it and let me take his photo, he even put on a smile for me. When I walked away from him it was pretty clear to me that this was his game. I think he knew exactly what impression he made on the typical tourist and where he was sitting, in the middle of the path where the lots were passing by, probably provided him the income he needed every day.

So, two different situations with two different perceptions and outcomes…
I feel bad that my perceptions and feelings prohibits me from sharing when I can. I was clearly in another mood being in Óia, off to capture what´s said to be one of the greatest sunsets around the world than when I was waiting around in the streets of Prague. An angry man (my intepretation once again) and one smiling old fellow made a huge difference to me.

My question to you is this; why do we let our fears, feelings, biased impressions and pre-assumptions get in the way of helping people that clearly needs a helping hand. Most of us are in a position where we could share more than we do, still many of us have a bad conscience for not sharing as often as we could…

This is a compilation of several testing timelapse shoots I did this summer. They are captured in Copenhagen (Denmark), Herfoel (Norway) and Hvasser (Norway).

I tried out many different settings on the quest of mastering changing lights over longer periods of time. What started the idea of learning the longer timespan shoots was a desire to capture a scene during the different phases of day and night in on single take. Sitting back looking at the material an interesting thought pops to my mind; it´s absolutely super boring watching the same scene that long:)

As I see many others being new to timelapse photography and seeking information about it, I will try to summarize what I´ve learned so far.
While shooting and editing this attached timelapse I encountered just about every problem described below, so please, don´t expect this timelapse to be perfect. It was merely shot for self-educational purposes:)

Good timelapse material is a real effort to shoot
The easiest way to get some decent material seems to be shooting in Aperture mode, even though some flickering issues tends to appear with the constantly changing light. I have even seen some decent stuff shot by +Philip Bloom on “all Auto” (shutter, aperture, ISO) and that actually worked quite well, at least a lot better than you would expect.

Not being satisfied with the shoots in Aperture mode made me try out the Manual mode. I read that some people actually managed to shoot scenes going from daylight to night on manual by constantly monitoring the camera and changing the exposures as you go along. I tried it out, however being as impatient as I am I got bored quite quickly. I figured out I wanted to go back to Aperture mode and use the jog wheel for exposure compensation instead, basically doing the same thing in a different way. What I experienced from both the “manual” tests was that I still had a flickering issue on the frames where I actually did the exposure compensation. Even though I only did one step up or down and kept that going for a series of shots, the actual adjustment would be visible when looking closer at the whole series of shots afterwards.
My guess is that this still might work out pretty well if you have the patience to even out the adjustments post processing the shots in Photoshop/Lightroom/Aperture afterwards. I still haven´t set away time to try this, but it might work…

Make sure you are free of all other responsibilities
It´s gonna take a lot of time to get the material you need so you might as well bring along what you need to have a good time! My best suggestions are a sitting mat or even a chair, a few beers, some food and good music.

What equipment do you need?
It would be pointless if you didn´t bring your camera and lenses so I´ll just put that one up first.
Secondly you will need a steady tripod and might even bring along a few plastic bags for the purpose of filling them with weight and hang underneath you tripod. That way you will get a steady shoot.

You will need memory cards with a good transfer rates to keep the intervals flowing evenly throughout the night. I experienced what should´ve been obvious to me; that the shutter speeds will get slower with less light, hence you will get fewer frames shot during the night and when edited into a movie it will seem like the night is actually a lot shorter than the day and evening. You will need to take into account what your slowest shutters speeds will be, how much time your camera / memory card will use to process each shot and plan your intervals accordingly to get a smooth and even timelapse.

Make sure to bring along enough good batteries and your battery grip as even the slightest movement while changing batteries or memory cards are crucial to the end result. Take my word for it, it´s really annoying screwing up a good scene because you had to change batteries every now and then.

An intervalometer is needed to program the interval rate of your shots. You can pick them up rather cheap on eBay, Amazon etc. I have one from Phottix which works absolutely great for my need.

A flashlight can become handy for several reasons if you´re shooting at night. You may need it for getting your focus straight, do some lightpainting on the foreground if you want to some stairtrail shots while you´re at it, and not so say making your trip back home safely.

Plan your shots
Like I said in the beginning, my idea when I started to doing this project was to capture a scene throughout day and night, getting all the changing light in one long timelapse. This turned out to be rather boring and the more I think about it I see that it´s crucial to have a plan.
A plan for what you want to show, which scenes do you want in there, what time of day/night feature the light you want to shoot it in etc.
For every scene you capture, make sure to throw in some extra material so you have something to work with in post processing, i.e. to make the transitions run smoothly between the scenes etc.

Hope some of you can use of my experience to your benefit and do not hesitate to leave a comment with your own experiences with can enlighten more people.

It´s always nice to get some publicity when you spend a whole day of shooting and 3 days editing:)

Click on the image to go the website or use this link http://www.hvaler.kommune.no/Video

My Final Cut skills are not all that, hence it has consumed a lot of time the last few days to tweak it the way I want to.

You can see the final result below, a movie compilation integrating stills, movieclips and timelapses from the island of Herføl, in the Hvaler district, Norway.
The timelapses are based on both ordinary and pinhole captures. I was eager to test the pinhole version as I´ve never seen it done before. I love mixing old techniques with the latest of technological features. The timelapses are shot with a Canon 5D MKII, the movieclips are shot with a Canon Powershot G12. The stills are captured with both cameras.
My target was to capture the moods of this magnificent island during wintertime, a season where it´s almost drained of people at all.

I hope you all will enjoy the movie and hopefully the beauty comes across to you as intended. Underneath you will find some more information about the island itself.

About the island of Herføl

Herføl is the most southern inhabited island in the municipality of Hvaler, in Østfold county, Norway. Situated on the borderline to Sweden. It´s 1,9 km² in size and has 14 inhabitants (source: wikipedia).

Herføl used to have a customs station and was a very important place in the fishing industry. Today Herføl has grown into a summer and tourism place during summertime. At the Herføl Marina you´ll find a grocery store, kiosk, dinery and a pub, all on a jetty by the fresh sea.

In order to get to the island, you would have to get on a ferry. Vehicles are not allowed on the island, this is the real beauty, which makes it magnificently quiet and well suited for great recreation.

Another small tease from my recent getaway to our summer house at Hvaler, Norway. I´m still working on a movie combining video, stills, timelapses experimenting with both HDR and Pinhole. It´s a great deal of work when you don´t have a lot of experience using Final Cut Pro:)

Anyway, this is one of the places I lined up for a timelapse to capture the sunset before I went on home. The location had great contrasts due to the low sun to the left and the pit fall the rocky landscape in front. I went for 3 bracketed exposures -2, 0, +2 and blended it with Photomatix Pro to get this result. A fairly good result with the ongoing light conditions.

The HDR blending is a bit over the top to look completely natural but I wanted a small portion of that artistic HDR look for this one. You´ll be the judge if you like it or not. As for the composition, I find it rather boring, plain landscape but easy on the eye still.

I´ll soon get back with the completed movie from this trip.

I´m still on the task of editing some of work I did at my recent getaway to our summer house at Herfoel, Hvaler, Norway.

In the meantime I´ve dug up an old image captured in the Hvaler area a few years ago just to show you how amazing the scenery can be during wintertime. Most people come to the area to relax during summer, hence, many never get to see the beauty of the place in wintertime.

I´ve wanted to do a long night time exposure for quite a while but never got my bottom of the couch to actually do it. I´ve been at my summer house at Herfoel, Hvaler, Norway, for a few days and found the perfect location on my way back from an 11 hr shoot by the coast.

The forest was pitch black, not a light in km´s distance and the night sky was all clear. I measured up the exposure time at ISO 200 and f/11 after a few tries and went on to let the camera suck in the light.

I was planning to go for about 35 minutes, however it only went for 23 minutes and was not saved due to empty battery. Amateur failure #1!!!
I had plenty of batteries in my backpack but was too hungry and beat down to bother setting up for another 1/2 hour.

The good thing is that I learnt a lot about measuring the exposure times and will be better prepared for the next time I set up for a shot like this.

Until another image with startrails come along, enjoy this one:)

Lighting a room – step by step, originally uploaded by Arnestad Photography.

This is a 7-image step by step model showing how I progressed to light a a difficult shot showing mulitple rooms with different amount of ambient light. It was managed with 7 speedlights in the end.

DESCRIPTION
In order to get the different rooms to get a better definition, a gel coat was added to the flash in the mid hallway in front. It adds a warmth to the room which helps distinguishing each room from each other. The image was then edited in Lightroom adding contrasts and a little bit saturation, vibrance and clarity at the end.

See all images that built up to this one…
- Step 1: www.flickr.com/photos/arnestadphotography/5223964937/
- Step 2: www.flickr.com/photos/arnestadphotography/5224563526/
- Step 3: www.flickr.com/photos/arnestadphotography/5223966551/
- Step 4: www.flickr.com/photos/arnestadphotography/5224565018/
- Step 5: www.flickr.com/photos/arnestadphotography/5224565892/
- Step 6: www.flickr.com/photos/arnestadphotography/5224566762/

Panoramic photo of Oslo, Norway, captured from Voksenaasen Conference Hotel an early morning in December. The view is perfect for a panoramic image, and I got quite lucky with how the mist worked with me this morning. The mist covers most of Oslo fiord and serves as a carpet on top of the city. The mist itself comes from the cold weathers and the humidity from the ocean.

Oslo has experienced the coldest Noevember in 94 years and the pollution becomes a problem when it stays this cold over a period of time. The pollution doesn´t leave the immediate atmosphere and serves a carpet of pollution on above the city. If this is what we see here I don´t know.