Galloway Forest Timelapses

Following on from my previous Timelapse film with lots of lessons learned, I took a trip to Galloway Forest in South West Scotland. The park is spans almost 300 square miles and is a dark sky reserve, meaning no light pollution inside specific areas of the park. While I was fortunate with the weather, 3 straight nights of clear skies, I didn’t consider what stage the moon was at *slaps head*. As it was close to a 70% full moon during the weekend I was there, it presented a challenge in effectively capturing the stars – still perseverance paid off in the end.

During the day I thought I’d give Joel (my 6 months old) an induction in timelapse photography:

I used similar kit as before, the Canon 7D with the Canon 16-35mm L 2.8, 24mm L 1.4, Sigma 50mm 1.4 and a Nikon 35mm 1.4. This was rigged up to the Kessler Crane Bloom Pocket Dolly along with the Oracle controller to automate all the tracking. Have a watch of the results below:

Winter Shadows: A Timelapse Film

Over the festive season we decided to have some fun and put a timelapse film together of Stafford in the Winter. The main reason being that we were excited to test out a new piece of kit, the Kessler Crane “Bloom” Pocket Dolly and the Oracle controller, which creates a wonderful camera tracking motion throughout the timelapse.

The aim of the piece was to capture the beauty of the season, while showcasing some of Staffords most attractive areas. Now we’ve been shooting timelapse for several years but usually it’s within promotional films or shorts with a narrative structure, so putting together an exclusively timelapse oriented film was tough put an extremely enjoyable experience none the less. So have a watch of our timelapse film: Winter Shadows and leave us a comment on facebook or twitter with your thoughts.

HDMI Cable Scam

As it’s the New Year I thought I’d try and get down to some of the sales, so being into all the technical stuff I stopped by one of the techy shops to see if they had any interesting gadgets in. Wandering through the TV section, I come across the TV leads and remember that I need to pick up another HDMI cable for one of my monitors. On the basis that previous cables purchased online and elsewhere have been in the single digits I’m curious as to why a high street shop would be selling them for between £50 – £250?

So here’s the deal for those of you that have just picked up a new HDTV. The £3.00 leads you get from Asda will give you the exact same image quality as a £250.00 lead from one of the so called “leading brand” companies. What intrigued me even more was when asking the staff about why the £250.00 lead was priced higher I was told: “it offers a significant increase in the image quality, there’s no lag etc etc etc”.

The truth of the matter is HDMI is a completely digital system based on binary code so if the signal is incomplete you won’t get less quality, it simply won’t work. While it’s true that there are different ratings of HDMI cable and if you tried sending a much larger image than your 1080 resolution such as 4K, through one of the Asda price cables then it would not work, but as we’ve barely moved onto High Definition that’s way down the road. As for Gold Plated vs. Silver cables – silver conducts slightly better than gold and tarnishes quicker, where as gold is a lesser conductor but will last longer.

So, if you find yourself in need of a HDMI cable for that new PS3 or Xbox, just get yourself a cheap cable off eBay for a fiver and save yourself a small fortune. Don’t get caught up in the HDMI cable scam as there is no quality difference between them.

Night Lights NSFW

Over the summer, myself and Nathan from NK Williams filmed a short to break up the ongoing promotional and corporate work and to give ourselves a chance to be creative within our own right.

Nathan had a short script ready which revolved around a love scene and I wanted a chance to try out my new Canon 7D and lenses in a creative and professional environment. So to see what we came up with, watch the film below:

New website 2.0

Well it’s Tuesday afternoon and about 2 years since I’ve been involved with anything to do with the Lilac website, to long! We’ve been extremely busy as of late and I’ve got lots of exciting news to share – features on the channel 4 news, international commercial series, new clients… but with trying to get this site completed for today deadline I’m going to have to cut this first post short as we’re shooting interviews with Urban Livings MD and Cllr. Simon Hackett to complete the Urban Living promotional film. More updates will come soon!