Nearly every photographer can relate a story about the magic they felt they were witnessing when they first waved a piece of photo paper in a tray of chemicals and watched as an image slowly emerged under the red darkroom lights.

For me, timelapse is kind of like that. You set up your camera, shoot for an hour, then later, when the frames are turned into a movie, you watch in amazement as clouds shoot whisk across the sky, people zip around at a breakneck pace, and the restrictions of time melt away.

I made this timelapse video over the course of an entire day at the 100th California Rodeo Salinas, starting before dawn and ending after dusk with the nightly fireworks show.

The video represents at least 5,000 frames shot and many hours of work.

One of my plans for coverage of the 100th California Rodeo Salinas was to make a highly detailed panorama, one that people in the crowd might be able to see themselves in, that would show the breadth and scope of the event in a single frame — as well as being something new and different for my newspaper’s website.

instead of buying the small robotic picture-taking device, we rented one from LensRentals.com in Tennessee.

The 10-day rental gave me enough time to practice with the Gigapan, which is actually quite easy to use.

You calibrate it for your camera’s field of view, you set the upper left and lower right corners of your image area, and away it goes.

It even comes with stitching and uploading programs to get your Gigapan image assembled and displayed online.

I had trouble with subject movement while shooting — women on horseback got cut in half, leaving bizarre floating torsos and unattached hoofed limbs. Some work in Photoshop to manually stitch the images cleared that up, but I needed quite a bit of computer power — at one point I was working with a one-gigabyte image with 13 layers.

Zoom in and poke around the image above, there’s plenty to see.

What was it like for photographers 100 years ago?

That was the question that led me to my little project of shooting the 100th California Rodeo Salinas with a 100-year-old camera.

I had the good fortune of being able to borrow such a camera from local camera collector Chuck Karnow, whose arsenal fills a room in his house and numbers nearly 500.

The four photos shown here are half of the 6×9cm frames I shot on the roll of 120 film. I’m amazed by the fact that a camera 100 years old takes film that’s still readily available and that the frames numbers on the film still match the frame counter window of this 100-year-old machine.

The folding bellows camera had just two shutter speeds — 1/25th and 1/50th of a second. The aperture dial wasn’t labeled, and the aperture blades — which are on the outside of the lens — were continuously variable from what we guessed to be about f3.5 to what we guessed to be f22.

Fortunately, our educated guess on exposure and the forgiving latitude of film produced a roll of properly exposed negatives — except for the final frame, when the shutter stuck open, denying me a portrait of a sitting cowboy before his saddle bronc ride.

Mine was not any kind of authentic test — This was color film, not black and white, and the ISO was far higher than what was used back then. To make deadline, the film was processed at a lab and scanned digitally.

It was just a fun exercise in using historic technology at an historic event.

Here are a few more frames from the roll.

And here’s the goofy behind-the-scenes video I made:

Here’s my first real timelapse video (as in, not shot on the “timelapse” mode of my point-and-shoot). Timelapse is well-suited for subjects that move slowly — so, of course, I decided my subject should be bike racers, whose sole purpose is to move fast. Why would I do that?

Well, it seemed like a good opportunity to show the event — the Sea Otter Classic — in a new way, and it was a good opportunity to experiment with timelapse.

This whole movie is made up of frames from my regular digital camera. If you consider that each second of the video is 24 frames, then I had to shoot 240 frames for ten seconds of footage. Then all those frames are combined — at full resolution — into a Quicktime movie file. A huge file. The benefit to doing this is that because you have all this resolution, you can pan around inside your video, which I did throughout.

In most timelapse videos, a frame is shot every second or so. But because I was trying to capture fast-moving bikes, many of these clips were shot with the motor drive going full blast, eight frames a second. I turned down the jpeg quality to medium (hey, this is web video) and was able to shoot for quite awhile before the buffer filled.

There are quite a few things you’ve got to wrap your mind around before successfully doing a video like this, and I had a lot of help from smart people online. Here are the resources I used to learn how to do timelapse:

• Timothy Allen’s timelapse tutorial on his BBC blog
• Philip Bloom’s timelapse tutorial
• Zach Wise’s timelapse tutorial
• The forums at timescapes.org

Here’s the top three useful things I learned about making timelapse videos with a digital camera:

1. Your shutter speed should be about half of the time between exposures — so if you’re taking a picture every second, your shutter speed should be about a half second.
2. To get those long shutter speeds in bright sunlight, you need good ways to limit the amount of light getting into your camera — like neutral density filters that are almost completely black.
3. A lens’ aperture blades don’t close down in a perfectly consistent manner every time — so even though every one of your exposures was a half second at f32, some frames will be brighter than others, and that will be noticeable when the video is played back. It’s called flicker. To minimize this, find a way to get your aperture blades locked down for the entire sequence. If you’re shooting with a Canon DSLR like me, you can hold down the depth-of-field preview, then twist the lens halfway off the body like you’re going to remove it. This will decouple the lens from the camera’s controls but the aperture blades will stay stuck down. Tricky!

Other notes: I composed the music for this video using apps on my iPhone and a multitrack recording program. Edited in Final Cut Pro. Total number of frames shot: I have absolutely no idea!

It’s the newspaper photojournalist’s monthly ritual: When the calendar page flips, you flip through the last four weeks of photos and enter the monthly clip contests.

Some months I’m stoked: Great stuff, hard to narrow it down. Some months I suck. (Some months I suck so bad I don’t enter.)

This month I’m stoked.

(Click the thumbnails above.)

I think if I wasn’t a photographer I’d want to be a firefighter. Three things that I’m a fan of that are a big part of a firefighter’s job: 1) Danger; 2) Fire; 3) Climbing on stuff.

I get to participate in all three of those things in my job, just far less frequently and not to such a great degree.

This photo shows a firefighter walking out of a burning home in Salinas, covered in insulation that he pulled down on himself while using a hook to rip through a ceiling. Cool job.

I finally won something in the SportsShooter.com monthly contest — a contest I’ve been entering for longer than I’d like to admit.

This image from the Salinas rodeo scored me a first place.

Check it out here.

UPDATE, 4/12/10: This image also earned a first place in the San Francisco Bay Area Press Photographers Association’s 36th Annual News Photo Competition and an honorable mention in the National Press Photographers Association’s 2010 Best of Photojournalism competition.

Athletes of the year. A couple portraits, in-studio. Happens every year. What to do?

Some newspapers do amazing things with these portraits. They set people on fire, throw them off buildings, amputate limbs … I exaggerate. We’re a smaller operation, so I have to work within our means.

My shift starts at 11. The assignment is at noon. Gotta think of an idea. What can I do with all these lights I have in our studio? I know — I’ll put them in the picture.

Here’s a setup shot:

And why should all the cool lighting be used only on my subjects?
Here’s a self-portrait:

I remember one particularly poignant hug, happened right in front of me. I didn’t get it, but the more experienced photographer from the larger competing paper did.

She looked at me and knew what I was thinking.

“Happens pretty fast, doesn’t it?” she said.

Sure does. Graduations are a feast of moments and expressions and emotion for a photojournalist. They’re also a feeding trough of cliches and ritual and repetition. The challenge is to make something meaningful and true.

Since that first graduation 10 years ago, I’ve shot countless others, and I’ve got a bit better at snagging the fleeting moments.

In the past week alone, I shot ten graduations. Here are a few frames.