During one of the last meets of Blurred in 2011 I showed all the pictures I had taken during a winter evenings walk and commented throughout with my thoughts and the inspirations that had gone into the photography purely as an insight into the way one photographer approaches his craft.
It was well received so I made a short movie to share with a wider audience. Here we go, enjoy:

Late last year I had to stabilise a fair amount of hand-held video footage taken at Stainsby Festival for Loscoe State Opera and ended up trying out a number of software routes before hitting on the best solution. I thought I’d share some of the journey and findings.

Plan A was to use a well damped video tripod from a sitting position and film the band from the front; if you can get smooth video right, right from the start then do so, you always save time and trouble. Plan B was to use an on camera stabiliser, a cheap and cheerful version of the film-makers steady-cam, but this was thwarted due to my inexperience with the device and limitations to movement on stage which was more cramped and cluttered than expected. So I shot hand-held with a view to steadying the footage in post production, something I had done previously with some success.

The footage was all SD, shot using two Sony cameras, one static so no stabilising required, and a second main camera hand-held, so lots of stabilising required.

Stabilising outside the camera is possible in a few software applications - After Effects, iMovie and Apple Motion amongst many. I have access to After Effects and Motion so I started their learning curves after some initial research into stabilising in general and use of the the above applications in particular.

After Effects displayed it’s usual full blown, in depth competency and I had some success early on but only with the least unstable and shortest clips. I found out AE comes packaged with a little application called Mocha which does the stabliser thing ‘for a living’. But there were just too many steps and too much learning involved for someone who doesn’t use the tool regularly, added to which, the clips I wanted stabilising were long and complex which didn't suit After Efects.

Both AE and Motion it turns out need either a ‘point’ or a ‘plane’ within the video frame which requires stabilisation to ‘focus on’ and I had neither. There was also too much 'going on' and too much movement which I wanted to retain.

Apple Motion 5 then. This has been my only impulse purchase from the Apple App Store to date and struggles a little on my oldish MacBook Pro. (On a side note I am beginning to hate the word ‘app’; this is a part of the continuing dumbing down of machines which I decry.)

Aaagh, (slow)Motion or what. I could just about cope with the long tracking times but altering keyframes or any other adjustments was painful. Motion also seems to require either a point or a plane to focus on like AE. So no.

After a little more investigating I came across iStabilize (sic). The programme seemed a little cranky and idiosyncratic in both nature and review, but I can relate to that, more importantly, most reviewers gave it the thumbs up when it came to performance. A few trial runs with the demo later and I went for it knowing that at least one other project in the offing would need a little stable attention.

It works fabulously well, quickly and efficiently. Excellent results with a minimum of learning curve. These are the main steps required to get going with a clip:

• Start iStabilize then:
• File/Open - the video file you need to stabilise.
• Movie/Format/Auto Detect - this will only take a moment. 
• Stabilizer/Track Motion - this seems to happen in real video time, in other words at around 1 second per second of video with SD footage.
• Stabilize/New Edit Session

Here is a side-by-side comparison for your edification - stable clip on the left, unstable on the right (just in case):

I only deviated from the default iStabilize settings by zooming the clip in order to lose the visible artifacts that can occassionally be seen when working with very unstable clips.

The finished movies, all stable, edited and tweeked     look like this:

I subscribe to Lensculture, an online photography and much much more magazine who always have inspirational artists and their work to share. But this recent post about photographer and artist Nancy LeVine really touched a chord with me, despite my being an abhorrer of the You-Tube-Funny-Dog (Not) email that occasional friends are prone to inflict but also  because I recently lost an old dog of my own and have seen what LeVine has seen.

'Senior Dogs Across America' is a wonderful and lucid look into the way both we and animals cope. The steadfastness of the various dog's gaze into LeVine's camera is entirely refreshing. We can so easily forget that others cope and thrive despite increasing years or infirmity when we are subsumed in our own private pain and fear. 

LeVine says 'I entered a world of grace where bodies that had once expressed their vibrancy were now on a more fragile path. I saw how the dog does it; how, without the human’s painful ability to project ahead and fear the inevitable, the dog simply wakes to each day as a new step in the journey.' 

Her referencing of the larger political changes taking place throughout the world also rang true with me.
These changes, for the worst in the most part, will have ramifications for everyone, so that a search for and a reaching out to indomitableness will become a certain required in the years to come.

We most assuredly are '... better than that' but our politicians most probably aren't.

I reckon there's a lot to be learned from senior dogs. Lovely images.

    My recent short set of images 'quarries' was an absolute pleasure to make and an absorbing afternoons work, more to come.

My love of and present reliance on the LX1 for image making started after making the decision to move from Nikon to Pentax and only half completing the move; I got rid of the Nikon but haven't yet bought the Pentax.

This meant re-discovering lots of reasons for enjoying the LX1 - It's small, very small, possesses a complete and really usable measure of manual controls, exposure brackets and compensates very easily, makes beautiful raw files, has a great Leica lens and makes 16:9 images with the flick of a switch.

I can no longer look at 4:3 (the standard aspect ratio of most still images) in the same way, they just don't resonate and I don't 'see' them as I look around for photographs.

Carrying the Lumix around has become second nature and has undoubtedly helped re-invigorate my photographic practice which was kick started a couple of years ago after my dear friend Linda pushed me to set up the informal Blurred photo group which meets monthly in Belper, Derbyshire.

Using the Lumix also means I only need to carry a very small, very light tripod around which is all this camera needs. Ah bliss.

A change of aspect ratio and/or a change of camera might be all that is needed to make you see new images and feel excited about your photography once more. It worked for me.

To quote Haje Jan Kamps - 'The best camera you own is the one you actually end up using.'