City View, 17:52

City View, 09:32

Going forward

Having recieved an encouraging amount of positive feedback, I have decided to develop Minutes further. That means more (and more refined) Minutes, higher quality video and better, stereo (or surround?) sound. It also means I won't be posting as many Minutes up here, at least while I get the new kit together and set up.

I am also looking into a better means of presenting it all. There'll be a website but, with luck, perhaps also an exhibition. Watch this space.

You can watch all of the existing Minutes in the archive, to the right of this blog »

Rooftops

Night shots

The night shots aren't working out as well as I hoped. In low light the camera boosts up the image digitally and you get a lot of noise. Unfortunately this wreaks havoc with the Flash video compression, so the picture quality suffers a lot.

It looks like I might just have to splash out on a proper video camera. In the meantime I'll probably stick to the daytime shots.

Fence

Streetlight

Sunday

Window

Saturday Morning

Setup / excuses

Technically, it's a bit lo-fi: just an off-the-shelf compact digital camera switched to video mode. And the video has been web-compressed. If it proves interesting I'd love to shoot some in a HD video format, and use a proper stereo microphone. But for now, see it as proof of concept.

Also, I'm a bit strapped for bandwidth at the moment so the video's a little over-compressed. If you know of anyone who will host and serve FLV video files then please let me know.

Thanks.

Minutes.

This is an idea I had a few weeks ago. I don't know how interesting it'll turn out to be but it costs nothing to have a go so what the heck.

Basically the idea is one minute photographs – shot as video with sound, but set up and framed as still photos. Sound is there to capture some of the ambiance along with each photo – the rain pattering on the window, distant police sirens, the muffled sound of the TV in the next room, whatever. And although the camera is fixed there will also be some movement in the image.

I'm not claiming this is an entirely original idea – directors and cinematographers have been doing this for decades – but I wanted to have a go myself. And to make each clip a standalone unit.

First minute coming soon.