On May Day this year the Friends of Priory Park here in Dudley organised an event with some performances, display stands etc. The weather was very kind – continuous sunshine, though some very strong gusts of wind did cause some alarm for the marquees. As usual with such FoPP events I tried to make a record with stills and video, and for the first time I tried some time lapse photography as well.

This was the first time I had tried time lapse, and I guess it shows. Although the result is usable (see the FoPP web site), in retrospect I would have done some things differently, notably setting the interval to more like 3 seconds rather than 6, and shooting from more positions, and perhaps at a longer focal length for this kind of event. Ideally I would have liked to have used more than one camera, but the need to stay close enough to avoid the equipment going for a walk was a consideration. The time lapse was all shot on the old Panasonic G1, in medium resolution JPEG, using a third party external release with a built-in timer as a trigger., and with the Panasonic 14-45 lens. I processed the images using Lightroom and a plug-in for generating video from the time-lapse images.

The video was shot on the Panasonic GH2 with 14-140 lens, and some stills were shot on this as well, the rest of the stills being shot on the GH1 with a 14-42 lens. The bright sun and heavy shadow in shaded areas made exposure a real problem. Aside from the time lapse, the rest of the material suffered seriously from a lack of planning – I shot quite a lot of material, but in the absence of a plan it is difficult to put it together to make any meaningful final video.

Two results of the event are that I got quite sunburned, and also the back and legs are worse again as a consequence of being on my feet for 10 hours, helping to assemble marquees, and lugging tables and chairs around.