I’ve been working on a project lately to capture a series of time-lapse images to capture a journey in the car. I decided some time ago that I wanted a wide-angle view out of the windscreen, but also capturing some of the side windows to capture passing traffic. After many test shots, I plumped with sitting the camera on top of the tripod on the back seat of my car, and securing the tripod with 4 elastic bungee cords. I set the camera to point down slightly and straight ahead in order to get the best view of the road. The next step was to set the camera settings. I used the Sigma 10-20mm wide open on the D300, (which I discovered to my pleasure had time-lapse functionality or interval shooting as Nikon call it I think) and set the camera to aperture priority. It took me many many attempts to get it to a point where I felt happy with what I was shooting – it’s not like you can just whip it off the tripod and look at the viewer on the camera whilst you’re driving along! So once I was satisfied with the positioning of the camera, and the resulting images, I picked what seemed like an average week, made sure that I didn’t move the tripod every time I removed the camera, and proceeded to shoot my “A week in the life”. In hindsight, this was the easy bit, because next I had to get them into some kind of movie. For this my only option, I figured, as I wanted a frame rate of multiple images per second, was Windows Movie Maker (I really didn’t see the point in buying any new software for one project!). Movie Maker is quite a nifty utility for splicing together a few images, but when you throw 2,500 at it, then it kinda grinds to a halt, even on a high end machine. This made editing & tweaking the film painful, really painful. It didn’t take too long to import the sequence, but once they were in there the application became very unresponsive. Just to remove a single frame or add a transition would take around 30 seconds. This unfortunately means that the final movie isn’t quite as polished and seamless  as I would have liked considering the amount of effort that went into the setup etc in the first place, but I just couldn’t sit in front of Movie Maker any longer as it had taken days to get to this point.

So with out any fanfare or pazazz, here is Fabrizio Filippini’s “A week in the life”….

It was a sad night for all Manchester United fans after we were truly outclassed and outplayed by a far superior Barcelona side on the night. I watched the match with several hundred other fans, a few tv cameras and a stack of official press photographers.

I’ve seen some of the images the other photographers shot on the Manchester Evening News site amongst others, but I think that mine are better IMHO ;-)

Some more photographs can be seen here

All the images from Malta posted over the last few days were pretty much as shot in camera with a few minor colour toning tweeks in Lightroom.

Whilst I kill some time waiting for my car to be MOT’d, here are some more images from my recent trip to Malta.

Click here to view the full screen slideshow.

Hey there all. Just back from a well worthwhile trip to Malta. The odd storm might have been nice just to liven up the skies a little, but otherwise the weather was perfect, great sunrises and sunsets, gorgeous during the day, and not too hot. I stayed in a Villa near the town of Marsaskala in the South East corner of the island. This is the part of the country where the tourists tend not to venture, and as a result the road were appalling. But fortunately I didn’t repeat the performance of Mallorca and the hire car went back insurance excess intact! I was there for a week and managed to see plenty. I had a really great guide who knew the place inside out and took me to some really interesting places.

The location has such a long and varied history  that the number of photographic opportunities was simply overwhelming. I’ve already been offered the use of a flat as a base and some wheels to run around in, so I’m seriously contemplating a return excursion later in the year. July & August would just be too hot for my namby pamby pink Scot’s skin, so I’m aiming to jet back around September / October time. Looking forward to it already. Anyway I’m going to drip feed a few frames here over the next few days. If you’re impatient and you want to see them all now, then I’ve uploaded them all to SmugMug this afternoon – click this link to view the full screen slideshow  -