Andrew M. Whalen » photography

Bellagio Fountain Shows

Andrew — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 18:19:06 +0000

While in Vegas I recorded a couple of the Bellagio fountain shows on my D90. They recorded in 720p, but are shown here in a lower resolution. I hadn’t really used the video recording mode before, but this was a great opportunity to test it out and I think it did pretty well.

Pink Panther

To view this video you’ll need the latest Flash Player.

Simple Gifts

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Project: Time Lapse Photography

Andrew — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 20:26:51 +0000

I’ve recently come up with a good workflow for creating time lapse videos from still images, so I added time lapse photography to my projects page. While doing this, I’ve had a chance to use gphoto2, ImageMagick, FFmpeg, and Audacity. All of those are free and open source utilities, so anyone can follow the same procedure.

Here’s a video I made last January, but I’ve updated it by recreating it from the original photos, and I added an audio track “1 Ghosts I” from the Nine Inch Nails album Ghosts I-IV.

To view this video you’ll need the latest Flash Player.

Another Day Out My Window

Andrew — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 15:57:51 +0000

This time around my bash script for gphoto started when it was supposed to. I captured a full day worth of photos, 1 every 60 seconds. The frames were captures on January 18th, 2008. I ended up with 710 photos in the final video, which is about 11.8 hours worth of the day. When I made the video, I set the delay to 1/10th of a second, resulting in 10 photos per second. So every second of this video covers 10 minutes of the day.

This video is better than my first attempt, but still not as awesome as I’d like. The morning started cloudy and a little snowy/rainy, then the clouds moved away and the sky turned bright blue until sunset. I’ll need to find a better vantage point to take some more striking images.

Another hindrance to finding a good location is that gphoto still doesn’t work correctly on Mac OS X. That means I can’t use it on my laptop, so the camera has to be tied to my Ubuntu box. Even though I installed gphoto2 with Mac Ports, I can’t find any solutions to the delay and disappearing file problems I’m having.

One Day Out My Window

Andrew — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 23:03:24 +0000

I finally got the Nikon EH-5a, the $70 power cord for my camera. It’s crazy that a cord can cost that much money, and all it does it supply my camera with power from a wall socket. I put it to use though, by running my camera all day on the 16th. I shot out my window towards the woods. Unfortunately it was a really clear day, the sun was never really in the picture, and the script didn’t start when it was supposed to (6am). Lots of problems. So the video’s kind of boring, but it was a good learning experience for when I do more time lapse videos.

Here’s the process I used. I installed gphoto on my ubuntu box. Gphoto allows you to control a capable camera with your computer. It’s a very neat program. There are tons of options I can play with, and I think everything is controllable through the software from aperture to shutter speed to white balance and ISO. I didn’t use any of its crazy capabilities though. I just wrote a bash script that called it every 60 seconds to take a picture and download it to the computer. I set the camera to aperture priority (A) mode. That way, the depth of field of the images wouldn’t change throughout the day, only the shutter speed.

Once I had a directory full of photos (just under 600), I ran ImageMagick’s “mogrify” command on them to resize them all to 600×366. From there, I used ImageMagick again, this time it’s “convert” command to turn all the jpegs into an mpeg, with 5 jpegs every second. This resulted in a movie that plays for a little over a minute that shows about 12 hours worth of time.

The Pond

Andrew — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 15:35:00 +0000

The pond in the backyard has some uninvited guests. I took the first 9 photos in the afternoon without direct sunlight. On a sunnier day, I took the pictures that are on the second page. I think I like the three from the second set better.

Camping

Andrew — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 20:59:41 +0000

The third and final camping trip of 2007 to Chester, Vermont, captured in digital.

Horses

Andrew — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 16:58:43 +0000

Lately, I spend about 2 hours in my car on weekdays for work at UMass. On the drive I often see things that would make great photos. On the drive home last week, I finally gave in and stopped after seeing these horses a few times. At the time I leave, the sun is just getting low, and casts great shadows across the field. I’m glad I stopped.

Andrew M. Whalen Photography

Andrew — Fri, 18 May 2007 16:08:19 +0000

As my final project for my Interactive Web Animation (Flash) class this semester, I decided to make a web site. I’ve had the idea now for awhile to have a site that is just intended to showcase some of my better photography. In 2004 I started a photoblog, which lasted for awhile, but I grew tired of taking photos just for that. The next step was keeping an updated photo gallery, but with that the photos are too scattered and inefficient to scan through. My final project gave me an excuse to finally make a site that just has the best of the best, displayed in an easy-to-browse fashion.

Enter Andrew M. Whalen Photography. The site features a spiffy Flash version, and also an HTML version if your browser doesn’t have at least Flash Player 8. Even if you do have Flash Player 8, there’s an option at the bottom to switch your browsing session between Flash and HTML. The About section contains links to featured photography of mine. Eventually, I may want to offer some sort of print ordering of the photos, to see if the site can produce a little cash.

Flower Photos

Andrew — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 13:52:45 +0000

Being spring, flowers around UMass are blooming into existence. I had a chance to walk around campus for a little while and capture some of the colors that are popping up. Although a cloudy day, I was still able to get some good stuff. Some of the bee pictures are my favorites, since I spent the most time standing around them trying to get good shots. They moved so fast and the light was so low that I had to up the ISO to 800 at some points. I never did get the frozen in-flight shot I really wanted, but some were close.

Time Lapse Sunrise

Andrew — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 14:14:45 +0000

Way back in January I was playing around with this great software called gphoto. It allows you to attach your digital camera to your computer and take photos. This has many uses, one of which is to create time lapse movies by writing a script to take pictures every so often. So that’s what I did, one January night. I wrote a script to take a picture every 15 seconds or so, and set it to run from 6am to 6pm. Unfortunately, my battery died only an hour or two in, so I came out with an 11 second video of a partial time lapse sunrise.