The clouds were perfect for time lapse. There was a slight breeze and they were moving nicely. I wanted to get some iconic Greenville buildings in the video, so I headed downtown to Springwood Cemetery.
I park out on main street and entered through the main decorative gate. I was looking for a spot where I could get a few of the monuments, along with several of Greenville’s buildings. Unfortunately, the department of corrections was doing grounds maintenance, so I had to find a spot where they weren’t trimming, etc.
I found what I thought was a suitable spot and set up the camera, settling in for a long haul with my little folding chair.
I had planned to let the camera go for about an hour. Quite honestly, I lost track of the time. I had the camera set to a 10 second interval, so a little over 300 shots means I was there for just under an hour. I hit my target pretty close. It was getting hot, and the grounds crew wanted to trim where I was set up.
In post processing I wanted to try several effects. The GoPro has a strong fish-eye effect, and I wanted to see how correcting for lens distortion and adding things like slight HDR and toning affected the final product. I used 23.9 FPS for each video.
The first video is straight from the GoPro with no effects processing. The buildings tend to lean in significantly.
In this version I used the fish-eye correction in the GoPro app. The buildings still lean in, but the one on the left just looks fatter. In my opinion, I’d rather not have the size distortion. The fish-eye autocorrect works for some things, but not here.
In the final version I imported all of the shots into Lightroom and used their built-in lens correction for GoPro. Once again the size of the buildings got distorted, but they still lean in, very much like the GoPro app’s effect. I also washed a slight HDR processing over the images. Here’s that video:
Rather than try to get in all three buildings, what I should have done was place one of them in the center, and focus on that building. That would have minimized distortion.
Even with the distortion, the clouds turned out wonderfully. What I really like is that you get large fluffy clouds down low moving one direction, and higher altitude clouds moving in opposition.
I’ll try more of these, but what I want to do is set up the GoPro, Nikon, and iPhone each taking shots of the same scene, then process those for comparison. I’m thinking I might head up to Caesar’s Head for that experiment.