KiskaMedia Blog

From all of us at Kiska Media, we would like to wish you and your family a happy holiday.

Your message is a living, breathing thing. Our production and design professionals translate it into something that takes your audience’s breath away. In nearly ten years, our goal’s never changed: Create visual media that shatters convention.

Frederick Water Shed (Video)

For this shot we hiked into a very remote section of our local wilderness were we could illuminate all Ambient light interference. I also wanted a lake to reflect the stars for composition purposes.

Here are the specs:

Shots #: 350

Aperture: 4.0

Shutter: 15 Sec

ISO: 1600

Interval between shots: 15 sec

Aperture Lock: Not enabled, didn’t work with our trigger

Moon: In sky, lighting our subject

Ambient Light interference: Just the glow of the city below

Post-Production: I did not apply any Noise reduction in the PSD Raw Conversion which helped a lot with the flickering. I applied a Noise reduction filter to the JPG Sequence in AFF and rendered it out and brought it back in to apply the Color Stabilizer, and it worked. We applied a nice Zoom on the footage.

Results: We managed to get the aperture to 4.0 and still keeping everything in focus allowing us to cut our ISO in half, vastly improving our image quality. we doubled our rate of shooting but in the end we just sped up the shot because it was too slow. Next time we should keep the interval between shots to 30 sec+. We absolutely have to fix the aperture locking problem with our trigger. Next were going to try and eliminate all other lighting from our scene, Shooting away from the city while the moon is not in the sky. Lets keep our fingers crossed!

I know were getting ahead of our selves with Season 2 not even out yet and were already doing testing for Season 3 but we just can’t help it. The show has turned into a catalyst for evolving our skill set and trying to perfect some of the more challenging shots, in this case Night Time-lapses. Inspired by the work of Tom Lowe and the film Baraka, we were kept up for many hours contemplating how we can apply some of the same techniques to our own vision. Our goal is to perfect the art of “Night Motion Time-lapses”, Stars whisking in the background over 4-5 hrs as the camera Dollies across a landscape. I researched this a couple of years ago and it was just too mathematically advanced for me to take on at the time. You had to custom build your own rig, and hood it all up to special devices to allow the perfect amount of movement each half second or so. Just recently my associate, Kyle Rhoderick was looking up some random stuff on Vimeo, found the time-lapse stuff that inspired me years ago, and then we found out that a number of companies have already put out systems that do all the mechanical movements for you…AMAZING! We were sold. We have our locations scouted, and our story locked in, not we just have to perfect the art.

Our first test: High Rock Tree (Video)

For these preliminary tests we are not using the slider yet, we just want to get down how to get a solid time lapse shot, with good lighting and none of the common problems like Aperture flickering and a ton of others things that can make a shot less than perfect. In this shot we were less than a foot away from a tree, shooting straight up with a LED light wrapped in a t-shirt on the ground about 10 feet away.

Here are the specs:

Shots #: 175

Aperture: 8.0

Shutter: 25 Sec

ISO: 3200

Interval between shots: 30 sec

Aperture Lock: Not enabled

Moon: In sky

Ambient Light interference: Street lights and other lights running on 60Hz causing flickering

Post-Production: We applied a Noise reduction filter in the PSD Raw Conversion process, which is a big mistake, it applies it a bit differently to each image causing a bit of a flickering affect. On the next test well possibly apply it in After Effects. The JPG images were imported into AFF as an image sequence and could not apply a Color stabilizer to a JPG Sequence for some reason. On the next test we will apply the color stabilizer on the Rendered file from AFF. We also applied a zoom and rotate on the image in AFF to give it some movement.

Results: A good, solid start. Lots of star movements, and the subject LED lighting was consistent.

After a very long wait we got the good news that our Season Finale of Photo Trekker “Acadia” took home a Bonze Telly for Cinematography! It’s great to see all our hard work pay off. I used to think that Telly’s were “easy” to win, or at least that was the word on the street for a while now, but they are anything but! Out of 5 total entries by Kiska Media, (most of the other entries being corporate videos and music videos) the only video to take home an award was Photo Trekker! That speaks very highly of Photo Trekker considering all our other entries were pretty top notch stuff, but I have to say the competition this year was very stiff. To check out the winning episode click here!

These are Awesome and Fun to do! You set up you shot and instead of shooting Video you just start firing off hundreds of shots, String them together and you get magic!
You can adjust Shutter speed to get real Streaks with lights and Blurry people. For these I was a bit sloppy and didn’t use my remote timer but did it by hand on the fly, a bit bumpy but it worked and the client loved it! The best part is you get to get a tutorial from a 6 year old…needless to say its not complicated.

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Here are some of my favorite Nature photographs as of 2010. The new 2011 season of Photo Trekker brought with it a ton of great new additions to the collection but they will only be unveiled with the start of Season 2. These photographs are a mix of 2005-2010, over 5 years of Traveling to some of the coolest places in the US. But most of the concentration was done on the east coast. I’ve lived there most my life, and you shoot what’s accessible. I always wanted to really explore the west coast, its where all the greats did some of their best work. The need finally came and Season 2 was born.

Here are some commercial photography samples I have created over the years.