Here is a taste of some photos I’ve taken lately though…

I spent an afternoon on the Boyle Street warm-up van but the story isn’t running for a while so here is just one photo. I’ll post more when the story runs.

Darryl Schwitz has been living on the streets of Edmonton for  years. He uses the Boyle Street Community Service Co-op warmup van frequently. Schwitz picks bottles every day to fuel is alcohol addiction and resides mainly in the west end of town.  February 24, 2010. Photo by Ryan Jackson / Edmonton Journal

I’ve spent the last week doing a story on the Edmonton Paralympic Sports Association. I’ve shot Paralympic Tae Kwon Doe, Soccer, Swimming, Floor Hockey and Sledge Hockey. The full photo story will run next weekend (I hope!). Here is a teaser from the series.

Left to right. Cassius Swampy, Emily Johnson who has cerebral palsy and Teresa Looy, swim instructor with the Paralympic Sports Association swim program at MacEwan University pool in Edmonton on March 6, 2010. Photo by Ryan Jackson / Edmonton Journal

Yes! That is a remote camera mounted on a sledge!  More pictures to come when the story runs.

The Shrine Circus is coming and I’m doing a time lapse from the end of a hockey game until the end of opening night of the circus. That should run on Saturday or Sunday.  See you soon!

University of Alberta Pandas Jaki Ellis celebrates a point on the University of Montreal Carabins with her teammates during the fourth and final quarter-final matchup at the CIS Woman’s Volleyball Nationals at the U of A main gym in Edmonton on March 5, 2010. Photo by Ryan Jackson / Edmonton Journal

University of Alberta Pandas  Tiffany Proudfoot dives for the ball during their second set against the University of Montreal Carabins during the fourth and final quarter-final matchup at the CIS Woman’s Volleyball Nationals at the U of A main gym in Edmonton on March 5, 2010. Photo by Ryan Jackson / Edmonton Journal

University of Albera physical education professor and exercise psychologist Tanya Berry believes there is a hypocrisy with elite Olympic athletes pushing fast food McDonald’s. She runs past a McDonalds on 109 St. near 84 Ave. in Edmonton on February 23, 2010. Photo by Ryan Jackson / Edmonton Journal

M.E. LaZerte High School female wrestler Breanna Egloff, 17, poses for a photo outside her school in Edmonton on February 24, 2010.

I shot Breanna wrestling for a story by Chris O’Leary for the Journal.

After the match the sky was beautiful and I knew she was hot from the match so I asked her if she would pop outside for a quick portrait. I already had my lights set up and there was a nice flat football field just outside the gym.

I used my DIY Tilt-Shift lens which is fixed at f2.8 and shot with my Canon 5D at 1/50 sec, ISO200.

Since I was shooting wide open at f2.8 I had to set my flashes to minimum power at 1/128.

If I could have done this again I would have asked her to not smile so much and not look at the camera. With that being said though, her smile really showed her friendly character. I wish her well in her wrestling career.

University of Alberta Pandas centre Alana Cabana has been hurt most of the season but is trying to heal up for playoffs. She poses for a photo at Clare Drake Arena in Edmonton on February 18, 2010. Photo by Ryan Jackson / Edmonton Journal

I was assigned to get a picture of a hockey player who has had many injuries over the last year. Rather than just getting a picture of her on the ice (which doesn’t really illustrate injury very well) I asked her to sit in the bleachers and set her gear beside her.

I placed two flashes behind her at 1/32 power with tinfoil barn doors on them so I could direct the light better.

I find tinfoil gives a nice shiny “harsh look” for rim light.  The fill light is just a flash at 1/8 power with a 1/2 CTO “orange” gel to warm up the light and a small softbox.

I shot it with a Canon 5D, 1/125sec, 50mm f1.4 lens at f6.3, ISO100.

Last month I spent an entire day with young figure skaters Lee Royer, 11, and Kyra Gregory, 10, who hope to one day compete in the Olympics as an ice dance team. I was amazed at how little I knew about this sport. First off, and most surprising, it is one of the most expensive sports. Ice time, coaches, and costumes add up to tens of thousands of dollars every year.  These kids wake up around 4:45am six day a week so they can practice before school and then after school they practice more. You know what I did when I was 10?…. nothing!  These kids were so inspiring and wonderful to follow. Enjoy!

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Click on the above image or here to see my interactive gallery of Northern Lights Artwork by Elmwood Elementary School. Interactive Gallery and time lapse video by Ryan Jackson / Edmonton Journal

Last week I had an assignment to photograph kids painting the northern lights.  I photographed a bunch of the art and recorded some of the students explaining their artwork.  I remembered that I had a few thousand frames of the northern lights that I had shot last fall that I never used for anything.  I put the images into a time lapse video using Quicktime Pro and then set them as the background for a panorama.  I used to use Flash Panorama Player for my panoramas but now I am enjoying krpano which I find has more options and supports video panoramas.

Icicles hang from  Herb Stark’s face after completing the 31 kilometre Edmonton Journal Tour event during the Canadian Birkebeiner Ski Festival which started at the Ukrainian Cultural  Heritage Village and ended at Cooking Lake-Blackfoot Provincial Recreation Area, 35 kilometres east of Edmonton on February 13, 2010. Photo by Ryan Jackson / Edmonton Journal

Competitors take off in the 31 kilometre Edmonton Journal Tour event during the Canadian Birkebeiner Ski Festival which started at the Ukrainian Cultural  Heritage Village and ended at Cooking Lake-Blackfoot Provincial Recreation Area, 35 kilometres east of Edmonton on February 13, 2010. Photo by Ryan Jackson / Edmonton Journal

Competitors take off in the 55 kilometre event during the Canadian Birkebeiner Ski Festival which started at the Ukrainian Cultural  Heritage Village and ended at Cooking Lake-Blackfoot Provincial Recreation Area, 35 kilometres east of Edmonton on February 13, 2010. Photo by Ryan Jackson / Edmonton Journal

Graeme Nishikawa from Whitehorse, Yukon, left, wins the 55-kilometre event followed by Ian Murray from Canmore, Alta. beside him during the Canadian Birkebeiner Ski Festival which started at the Ukrainian Cultural  Heritage Village and ended at Cooking Lake-Blackfoot Provincial Recreation Area, 35 kilometres east of Edmonton on February 13, 2010. Photo by Ryan Jackson / Edmonton Journal

MaryAnne Rintoul holds up a metal that her grandmother won for competing in the Birkebeiner race in Norway over 90 years ago during the Canadian Birkebeiner Ski Festival which started at the Ukrainian Cultural  Heritage Village and ended at Cooking Lake-Blackfoot Provincial Recreation Area, 35 kilometres east of Edmonton on February 13, 2010. Photo by Ryan Jackson / Edmonton Journal

1,200 students, staff and faculty at the University of Alberta unofficially smash the Guinness World Record for most players in a single dodgeball game at the Universiade Pavilion better known as “The Butterdome” in Edmonton, Alta. on February 5, 2010. The former record was 450. The event was organized by the U of A students’ union. Photo by Ryan Jackson / Edmonton Journal

Watch a time lapse in 360-degree Video ….that’s right…a 360-degree video panorama! Click on the image to the left.

Watch a time lapse of the Murder of Crows sound exhibit being set up at the Art Gallery of Alberta. 98 speakers are set up over a two week period. Time progresses all around you as you click and move your mouse to look all around.Video by Ryan Jackson /Edmonton Journal.

To build make this 360-video I had to build a special rig with three cameras. I used this before for my Indy Panoramas back in the summer. The rig consists of three old Canon 1D d-SLRs with three Peleng 8mm fisheye lenses in a 120-degree offset pattern. The three cameras are wired together to be triggered by an intervalometer. The rig is super heavy and annoying because triple cameras means triple the things to go wrong. If the shutter speed or focus or anything is wrong on one off the cameras then the whole panorama is ruined.

The 1D cameras can only handle 2GB Compact Flash cards which is around 2000 images. I set the intervalometer to trigger the cameras every two minutes which meant I had to change the cards every two days. In total nearly 30,000 images were taken (10,000 per camera).

For post-processing the images, I used Photo Mechanic to organize the images by time taken. I had set the clocks on the cameras to be 1-second apart so when Photo Mechanic sorted the images by time taken, they would go 1st camera, 2nd camera, 3rd, camera, etc.
I then renamed all the images so the files went 0001, 0002, 0003, etc.

I use PTgui to stitch all my panoramas together. It has a great batch process where you can setup a template for your first panorama and then it will auto stitch the rest of the panoramas in file order. This meant that (0001, 0002, 0003)–>Panorama1.jpg , (0004, 0005, 0006)–>Panorama2.jpg

Needless to say this took HOURS and HOURS to process but I just let my laptop chug away overnight for three nights until I had a folder filled with thousands of stitched panoramas.

I then looked through that folder of panos with Photo Mechanic and removed all the boring images where nothing is moving or being installed (ie. at night time, during lunch break, days off, etc).

I then took the folder of usable panorama images and put them into a video using Quicktime Pro’s “open image sequence.”

I set the frame rate to 12fps so that 1606 images would become a 2-min:13-second video.

I then told Quicktime Pro to export the video and I used the Adobe Flash Video Encoder Plug-in to export the video as an .flv Flash video file using On2 compression, 2000×1000 resolution, 12fps, 1200kB/s bitrate. This made about a 20MB video file.

I purchased the panorama player krpano which supports video. I only had to alter a little bit of the .xml code to add a full-screen button and a play/pause/stop button. I plunked the krpano files on a server and embedded it in an iframe in a story page.

The whole project was pretty cool. I hope to use this camera more in the future but as you can see, it is A LOT of work. There are other, far easier methods of doing 360-video but you have to buy expensive cameras and lenses. For this setup I only had to buy a couple more 8mm lenses and use The Journal’s old 1D’s. My rig only shoots stills and you have to make them into a video… for real video check out CNN’s 360-degree video from Haiti. Pretty crazy!

Here are the images of my DIY 360-degree video panorama camera.