Just some new winter/spring stuff shot mostly on the 5D2.

http://www.vimeo.com/4038064

Edit: Here is a direct 1080p download link, for those of you with computers and screens to handle it:

http://www.timescapes.org/LearningtoFly1080.mov

(1080p MOV. H264, 352MBs)

Great video! For all the complaining people are doing about the 5D2 video, it sure can(in the right hands) make a nice movie!

Excellent footage and composition. I am somewhat mystified by the lights in the lower right corner in the first clips - both the bright ones flicking on and off and the plane-like ones going in circles. Do you know what's going on there?

Finally we get to see your 5dii work!! Really awesome Tom!

I'm wondering how you did the rolling shots?? They seem so smooth and you can see stars! I'm guessing it's the F1.4 in movie mode? Amazing.

I wondered the same... Might it be an airport with planes and some crazy floodlight?

That was some type of military activity at the nearby Goldwater Air Force base.

Jay, you're right about the night driving shots. It's ISO 6400 @ f/1.4.

Those are some beautiful shots Tom. I especially like the shot of the snow covered mountains with the pan down (White mountains I think? I've hiked all over that area...).

DELRIOUS

Hi,

Lovely images.

Was the moving stuff video?

WOW! Stellar footage! Apparently I now need a 5Dii? Haha.

The joshua tree footage from about 3:15 doesn't look like it could be video as the stars and trees are so visible which means it must actually be pretty dark. How did you TL that, or is it video? Were you driving? How fast? What kind of settings? Sweet work Tom!

It's timelapse, 1/2s exposures, ISO 6400, f/1.4. I was driving really slow, but as you can see, it's tough to do. Plus my tires are off road ones, not really perfect for this. I'm working on some new solutions for this genre of moving timelapse as we speak.

BTW, I added a 1080p direct link up there.

Here is a torrent of the 1080p version:

http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/4835954 ... ing_to_Fly

BTW, are any of you guys Digg power users? I'd love to get this onto digg.

I just wrote a short review on "stumble upon".

i'm seeing a lot of traffic from stumbleupon over the last couple days, but i've never really figured out how that works.

Absolutely amazing footage! Breathtaking indeed! 5d2 footage is good! Now I need one too!

Great shots Tom.
I'm pretty much thrashing my 5D on daytime time-lapses now, mostly just doing shots on the 5D2 in the darker conditions (which will be all day every day for the next 4 months next week when the sun goes down).

BTW, Tom, your video has been dugg...

http://digg.com/search?s=http%3A%2F%2Fw ... %2F4038064

Those of you on digg, go ahead and digg it up.

awesome, thanks!

Really amazing Tom, absolute pleasure to watch.

Tom,

Learning to Fly is just amazing. I downloaded the 1080p version and watched it several times...it's the quickest 4:18 I've ever spent.

I have a 5D MKIi and I have been concentrating on astrophotography lately, but after seeing your video, I had to give timelapse a try. I have an old Vixen equatorial mount that I'm using for slow motion timelapse pans and it works great, but I am having trouble with hot pixels showing up during the pans (I've been doing 1/2 second exposures at 6400, SRAW2). I can't see any way around the hot pixel issue, as you can't enable long exposure noise reduction due to the doubling of exposure time. I can't fix the problem in Lightroom, and I certainly don't want to Photoshop thousands of files to get rid of the hot pixels. Did you have this issue and if so, what was your fix? I'm guessing you are shooting SRAW also, or are you using straight jpegs?

Once again incredible video...I'm amazed every time I watch it.

Regards,

Josh

Josh, definitely don't shoot sRAW. I did the same thing when I first got the camera. The trouble is, with sRAW, the demosaicing programs like Photoshop or AE or whatever do not see the hot pixels as individual pixels, but rather as a blob of light, and so the programs do not automatically remove the hot pixes as they would if you shot full RAW.

Even JPEG can leave some "dead" pixels.

Your best bet is to shoot full RAW if you can. I am using cheap 32GB Transcend CF cards, and they seem to work fine for night timelapse.

Processing 21MP RAW takes a lot of time and CPU power, but the results are ridiculously awesome!!

Hope that helps.