It’s hard to believe that a year has gone by since we walked into the Final Say March while in London. We weren’t taking part but we did watch it travel down St James Street. And I photographed the passing action via the reflections in a puddle. Huge numbers of voters took to the streets to demand that the final Brexit decision should be made by the public. It wasn’t to be.
And I all I have to show for it are twenty or thirty photographs of a puddle.
I was happy to discover that about twenty of my photos could be aligned and animated in Photoshop. Normally, I only use the GIF animation capability in Photoshop for series of photos taken on a tripod. Having stumbled over these pictures when looking at my library of pictures taken on this date, I thought a few could be used to make a GIF. And while importing a selected few, I noticed that Photoshop had been updated. So I read in the release notes and tested the alignment feature that had been improved.
Here are are couple of other GIFs I’ve made over the last year. These are timelapse pictures made from tens of images with a camera on a tripod pointed out of a window. Despite the tripod, heat and breezes introduce different distortions to the images over the time that elapses between them. This requires registration of each of the images and not all of the alignments will be perfect. In the case of one, the distance was several kilometres. In the other, the aperture also restricted the depth of field.
The Shard Christmas displays in London in 2019 were designed by local schoolchildren. We had seen the tests over the weeks leading up to the nightly shows and I’d practiced pointing a 1600 mm lens at The Shard. This animation is made of fifty exposures, about one a minute.
The coal tits used a prominent branch in our hedge as a lookout before entering their nest in the flue over our kitchen. I set the camera to take photos every second and selected 109 frames to make this animation. I knew I would need to invert the pictures to make it more interesting.
We finished the day with two zoom calls. The first was with the grandkids and we all ate dinner together. The second was after their bedtime, with their parents. A wine and cheese hamper had been delivered to each household for a coordinated birthday celebration. This was once the way to manage intercontinental events while keeping the family together. Now we zoom to stay apart.
The pampering with hampers was a great idea.
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