taking pictures from large vibrating ferry

[glenn_p]

Hi,

 

I've been doing some timelapse shooting and am interested in doing one from

the deck of a ferry as it approaches Seattle from the West. The problem is

that the ferries here (and I assume most) vibrate a lot. It is the kind of

vibration you can feel as you stand on the deck. I know people use sandbags,

but I'm guessing that is when the tripod is on a more solid surface...

 

Any suggestions on how I might dampen the effects of vibration? To make

matters worse, the kind of timelapse I do normally involves having the shutter

open for at least a second. Well, I'm guessing that will make it worse

anyway, I'm still pretty new to all of this.

 

My camera is the Canon XTi, and I have a pretty heavy tripod for it, and it

does have a hook that I can hang a heavy bag from.

 

Thanks,

Glenn

[gdanmitchell]

This sounds like a complicated problem.

 

Not only does the ferry vibrate a bit, but it also moves forward and rocks on the

swell/chop. Setting a tripod on the deck will get you a nice sharp image of the ferry itself,

but everything else in your world is going to be moving around a bit.

 

My recommendations are to a) try to use the motion of the Seattle skyline, etc. as part of

the image, or b) figure out how to use a much shorter exposure.

 

Dan

[geoffs1]

I don't know what you can do about blurring from the the long exposure, but one possibility is to leave some margin around the scene you want to capture and then align the frames relative to each other keeping whatever part of the scene you want to remain (relatively) motionless, then trim off the excess from all the frames. There are actually some video/film editing systems (or plug-ins) that can do this kind of post-hoc motion removal, too.

[geoffs1]

Another possibility would be to rig up a gyroscopically stabilised "steadicam" like system: http://www.ken-lab.com/stabilizers.html

 

You can rent them from a variety of places for about the same cost as a long-telephoto lens.

[glenn_p]

Ugh... I had not even thought of boat movement due to swell, I guess I was thinking the boat was large enough relative to the size of the swell in Puget Sound that it wouldn't be an issue. I think I'll just head out and try it out, see how bad the blur is, and evaluate again. That gyroscope system looks pretty cool, maybe I'll look into renting one if the end result of my test is poor.

 

Thanks for the ideas everybody!

[jay ott]

Although you normally use slow shutter speeds, this time why not consider a higher ISO and/or increasing your shutter speed sufficient enough to eradicate all blur or are you doing this in low light?

[glenn_p]

Well I just tried it this evening. While the vibration really felt strong, it didn't seem to have a huge impact on the final result. The wind was really strong too, and I could see the image vibrate through the view finder, but maybe having 1 second exposure caused the image to average out? Not really sure... as far as I know the lens that I have (efs 18-55) doesn't have any built in stabilization.

 

You can see the sample at my youtube site : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyMAMN18M0Q

 

The only noticible shake you can see in this was when I tried to move the camera to keep the city in view, as the ferry altered course a few times.

 

Anyway, the only problem now is I forgot to switch from shutter priority (TV) back to Manual after I figured out the best average aperture to go along with my 1 second shutter speed... so now my series of stills has a bunch of frames at f-stop 20, then a few at 22, then back to 20, and so on, and it makes for a weird light cycling effect, it got really bad as I neared the buildings which had a lot of sunlight reflecting off of them. I wonder if any software out there can take a series of frames in a directory and average out their brightness somehow? I'll plan to reshoot this anyway though.

[JohnMWright]

The result really isn't bad at all in terms of the motion. Very cool effect. I see what you mean about the light changes, it sort of reminded me of an old time silent movie. It may not be what you want but it was fun to watch anyway.

[alex_lofquist]

You might do what I do when on safari: Ask the captain to stop the boat!

Seriously, hand holding is the best way to minimize the effect of vibration. Otherwise you are just coupling the movement up through the tripod legs into the camera/lens. VS or IR lenses would certaonly be preferred in this situation.

[glenn_p]

Stopping the boat isn't really an option, since the point of the timelapse is to capture the movement as the ferry approaches the city. Hand holding isn't really an option either, since I'm taking 1000 photos each with 1 second exposure. Even though my body might transmit less vibration, I'm pretty sure the tripod can hold the camera in a more consistant position than I can for that many shots.

 

During my testing, I found that the vibration isn't as bad at the front of the boat as it is near the back, above the engines. What is actually a lot worse is the wind - there seems to be a lot of wind turbulance around the front, so now I'm thinking I might have better luck bolting the camera to the rail rather than using a tripod, if I don't get into trouble with the ferry staff for doing that.

[eric_onore]

Glenn,

 

Could you provide some information on the process you used to combine the photos, etc, and get them ready for display. I really liked the effect and would like to know more about it.

 

Thanks,

 

Eric

[glenn_p]

Hi Eric,

 

Thanks. I use Adobe Premeire to combine all of the individual photos into a timelapse. This one had 1110 photos, taken at 1 second exposures as quickly as the camera can take them (and then save them). In premiere you can set the default still image duration when you open a directory of photos, I set each photo to 1 frame, which is 30 a second. So, this was a 30 minute ferry ride, compressed down to about 36 seconds. The camera takes enough time to saven an image that it shoots & saves about 37 a minute at 1 sec exposures. There are some really cool timelapse shorts that people are making out there, I'm still learning.

 

Glenn