Thanks for stoppin' by and checkin' out the Bsombin' blog! A couple of weeks ago, I went out to 15th Street to shoot DangerustLA's Cruise Night. I wanted to try out some ideas and do something different from all the lowrider photography that I had been producing lately. And I wanted to see how people would react to my experiments.
After posting some of the experimental images I shot on 15th Street, I got some good feedback from the lowrider community and from some of my fellow creators. DangerustLA (the promoter who hosts the cruises on 15th St) actually contacted me about a short time lapse video I posted. He liked the video and asked me for a copy of it. I explained to him that the video was just a test. But I still sent it to him. I also told him I would make a longer video the next time I went to one of his cruise nights. It turned out that he was hosting a cruise night on Van Nuys Blvd. last night.
Since I feel right at home on Van Nuys Blvd, this made it the perfect opportunity to shoot a cruise night time lapse. I spent the whole day thinking about how I could shoot the time lapse. I wanted to be as efficient as possible and make it so that I wouldn't have to spend a lot of time in post assembling and editing the pictures. I came up with a plan and decided to shoot the cars from a few angles and to try and have the shots lead into one another. I tried to make the final shot from one car transition into the first shot on the next car, by playing with long exposure effects and tricks that I have learned and developed over the years. I also made sure to keep the sequence of cars in order, to make sure the video flowed properly and made sense. I began shooting at 1/100 of a second and slowly brought the shutter speed down to 1.3 seconds. I also adjusted the ISO and F-stop, while changing the shutter speed. I shot the majority of the time lapse at 1.3 second exposures, to create light trails and make things more interesting. I kept the shutter speed the same until the end of the time lapse. There, I adjusted my setting back to what they were at the beginning, so that the video would fade out the same way it faded in at the beginning.
It was a lot of work shooting all the images for the time lapse. I shot for two and a half hours, walked almost 2 miles, and took 790 pictures, for the time lapse. But I was successful in shooting it in a way that allowed me to make the post production work minimal and as quick as possible. Post took less than an hour. And most of the time was spent waiting for my Mac to load the images into iMovie and then waiting for iMovie to render the video. All I did was import all 790 images straight into iMovie and adjust the duration of time each image played from 4 seconds to .2 seconds. Then I added a title, my logos, and some music. Finally, I color corrected the video and added a film filter to cool down the colors and give it more texture. But you can check it out for yourself and see what you think...
I'm really happy with how it came out. I've decided to start making more of these time lapse cruise night videos. And, I'll be posting them here and on my YouTube channel, moving forward. So make sure to check out the channel and subscribe, if you love lowriders! And don't forget to check back here for more Bsombin'!
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