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!

I just returned from a vacation in my former home state of Ohio, where I lived from 2000-2002. I met my wife there before the two of us left for California together. This trip was to see her family and old friends. I had an amazing time. I also shot a photo essay with my iPhone.

Why do I make things so hard on myself?

Why, when thinking up a lighting scheme, do I insist on things like, “The flash will fire at the camera but instead hit a mirror which will light the subject’s face, and oh, by the way, the camera will be clamped to a car while it’s driving down an alley and let’s make sure there’s no lens flare and we have to get all this just perfect before sunset because there’s another shot to do with another tweaky and annoying lighting setup.” (?!)

And so, I found myself adjusting a lens hood made out of gaffer’s tape as I ran next to Glen’s vintage car down an alley, gently supporting a camera on a magic arm clamped to the door, firing off a single frame as we got up to speed, urging Glen not to move his head too much or the circle of light created by the finely-adjusted side view mirror won’t fall on the right spot.

It worked, as you can see from the photo above. But it certainly helped that I had help.

It helped that the subject was Salinas portrait and pin-up photographer Glen McDowell, who frequently has me work with him at weddings. It helped that Glen’s assistant Annette was there, and it helped that my pal Travis Geske came along. Both helped with key suggestions on lighting and by moving gear.

Here are some photos from the shoot made by Travis:

This shoot was a self-assigned project — I wanted to do a portrait like this, Glen wanted some new portraits for his new website (and honestly, I owed Glen some favors). There are more such self-assigned portrait projects in the works.

Los Dryheavers know how to rock. My band opened for them at a show at the Blue Fin in Monterey on Saturday, March 13.

Here’s a few photos from the show, which ended with singer Hector getting an earful of Jake’s tongue. Good times.

Click the thumbnails below to enlarge.

They’re the little theatre company that could.

For years, Paper Wing Theatre Co. has been persistently producing the most challenging theater in Monterey County, California. They do their plays on shoestring budgets, with beginning performers and in venues that sometimes lacked heat (and often lacked big crowds). This theater company has heart.

And for years, I’ve been photographing their productions in both Salinas and Monterey for their publicity campaigns. The photos went out to local publications; some were printed and hung in the theater’s lobby. Today I’m adding a new place they can be found: in my Photoshelter archive, available for purchase and download.

Over the years, many actors have asked me about getting prints of photos from past productions. They’re all available now, and I’m offering a special coupon to get things started. The first 15 people to use the code “PAPERWING” on checkout will get 30% off their order. I’m keeping the print prices really low, so there’s a real bargain available here for people who hurry.

So whether you appeared in one of the many infamous productions of Rocky Horror or you were part of the huge cast of Guys & Dolls, or you were in the recent multimedia musical The Wall, head on over to the archives and poke around.

Here are a few of my favorites.

I lived in Florida from 1996 to 2000, and one of my big regrets from my time in the Sunshine State was never seeing the Florida Keys. So when my parents said they’d be spending the winter there, I knew it was time to make the trip.

A little background: Around the time I moved to Florida, my parents ditched the house in favor of a 41-foot sailboat. They live on it full-time, spending summers in Maryland and winters where it’s warmer.

This was going to be a short trip for me: Fly into Miami, Greyhound to Mararthon, spend time with the folks, see Key West, go sailing, all in four days. Unfortunately, it rained during two of them — and Florida’s water temperature hadn’t recovered much from the coldest winter in recent memory. Still, I arrived for a beautiful sunset, we went for a great sail (during which dolphins frolicked under the bow of the boat) and the skies parted enough to give us a day of sun in Key West — through late-arriving clouds obscured any sunset.

This was a vacation trip so I didn’t spend a lot of time focused on serious photography, but are a few of my favorite snaps.

I did some band photography this week for my favorite Golden State secessionists, the mighty Cali Nation. These photos were shot on location at Z Minor Sound Studio, owned by Andrew, the band’s frontman and my compadre in audio recording for several years running.

For the above group photo, I used my newest toy, a painter’s pole with a metalhead, allowing photo gear to interface with something from a hardware store. Using the painter’s pole, I dangled a small softbox over Andrew’s head while his daughter pushed the shutter release on my tripod-mounted camera. (So technically, Sarah and I are sharing photo credit.)