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Christmas Gear

Posted on December 26, 2012 By Tom No Comments on Christmas Gear
Family, Gear, Photography

Christmas 2012

This year we spent Christmas in Greenville. Instead of traveling to Florida like we usually do, Laura’s sister and mother came up to visit us. The foggy Christmas morning was spent opening gifts and relaxing.

Since I’ve been so obsessed with time-lapse lately, I decided to do one of our gift giving routine. Here’s a short video…

The entire video was created on an iPad 2. I used the iMotion app shot a 1 frame every five seconds. I used the Garage Band app and an Akai LPK25 keyboard to record the music, and I used the iMovie app to add titles and mix everything together.

Last year was a paddling/music related Christmas. This year it was photography gear. I got a portable light tent studio with lights for photographing small objects.

Portable Light Tent Studio

This replaces a homemade light box I had made. I really just wanted the lights, but it turned out to be cheaper to get the entire kit rather than the lights by themselves.

In keeping with the time-lapse obsession, I found a small panning tool that will work great with the iPhone and other small cameras. The Camalapse 3 is basically an egg timer with a tripod mount. You twist it to set the time, up to 60 minutes. The device rotates slowly during the time-lapse for panning effects.

Camalapse Timer

Here it is with the smart phone bracket and with my iPhone attached…

Bracket mount on Camalapse
iPhone with bracket mount on Camalapse

The real score, though, was a GoPro Hero 3 Black. This one came with a WiFi remote and lots of cool features. I was really surprised how tiny this camera actually is.

GoPro Hero 3 Black

The instructions right out of the box said that an update was necessary before use. I dutifully logged on, along with everyone else who got one of these cameras for Christmas. The demand was too great for their website, and GoPro was facing a PR nightmare as new users complained about getting server errors. I decided to go ahead and use the camera. Good thing – it wasn’t until after 11:00 pm before I was able to get the update installed.

Suitably armed, I had to try out the new gear. Dinner was the perfect place to try it out, with Amy cooking our Christmas turkey.

Christmas Turkey

I set up the GoPro in the kitchen to do time-lapse as we were cooking, and set up the iPhone and Camalapse for panning in the dining room. I let them both run as we were cooking, then eating the meal.

When we were done, I was surprised to see that my 32 GB card on the GoPro was full. It turns out that I had the camera set to take 1 shot every 0.5 seconds, rather than 1 every 5 seconds, like I normally do. At 12 megapixels that can eat up a TON of memory. It took almost all night to render the time-lapse, but I added the clips to iMovie, added a bit of music, and uploaded the video to YouTube.

I’m looking forward to using the new gear. Apart from the GoPro camera, the rest of the gear was relatively inexpensive. I’m going to enjoy finding new ways to use the cameras.

Tags: camera Christmas family gear Taylor time-lapse Wright

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