Category: Tourism

Taliesin, Spring Green

A few weeks ago we took a trip up to Spring Green to see both the American Players Theatre and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin, his home in Wisconsin and on 800 acres he used as a place to teach his architecture students. It is currently 400 acres in the Taliesin Preservation Trust. The home is the third one Wright built as the two previous ones burned down. You can only visit the grounds and structures, of which there are many, in a tour group, so photography is limited in time as you stroll through and hear the history of the place. The photo’s are all shot during a tour using my iPhone.

Being someone who thought about becoming an architect and then starting my career in photography as an architectural photographer I have an admiration for many of Wright’s designs. Although he was clearly not good on the structural side of design. I love his prairie style with it’s overhangs and lots of windows. One interesting thing he did being only 5’ 5” tall was make short ceilings, especially when entering a room though a hallway or changing spaces within a room. His thought was it makes you want to move into the bigger space, often with vaulted ceilings.

On the house tour you also see what used to be a barn and is now used as apartments for those who studied under Wright and still live on the property as well as staff.

It is a trip worth doing if you like architecture! Enjoy the images.

Cheers,

Richard


Chicago Skyline Time-lapse

I did my first real test of the of the “holy grail” of time-lapse where you go from daylight to night-time (or the reverse). I used the Timelapse+ VIEW intervalometer and software plugin for Lightroom CC to handle the exposure changes. I did this from the Montrose Harbor area looking down to Chicago, an iconic view of this beautiful city. We started the exposures at 6:40pm and finished 2 hours and 44 minutes later at 9:24pm. This gave us just under a minute of video from the 1,408 images shot. For those interested it was shot with the Canon Mark 5d IV with the 24-105 lens set at F/11. The ISO started at 100 and ended at ISO 8000. The shutter speed started at 1/80 of a second and ended with an exposure of 4.0 seconds. A total of 14.5 stops! Timelapse+ VIEW was setup to change the shutter speed first and then the ISO. Timelapse+ VIEW Intervalometer will automate night to day time-lapse using a light sensor and advanced algorithms. This system worked really well and once you take it into Lightroom in post processing the plugin finds the keyframes which you can use to do the initial processing in Lightroom Development window to make any exposure / color corrections you require. The software then makes these corrections for the entire selection in subtle increments so you have a finished piece with smooth transitions for a beautiful time-lapse.

Now one thing I know I will try next time is starting with at least a 1 second exposure to make the water smoother throughout the time-lapse. I would also go longer into the nighttime view to give a little more room in editing to be able to use a longer nighttime scene.

This Timelapse+ VIEW intervalometer and what we will be able to do with it will be a great addition to The Sweetwater Seas – North America’s Great Lakes documentary! It will be in the equipment bags for every shoot from now on! Can’t wait to get outside along  the Great Lakes and do some day to night with the Milky Way winding its way across the screen, and maybe even back to daylight.

Enjoy,

Richard

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