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 Christmas Parade
 
Location: BlogsFrame 37    
Posted by: photoblog 12/3/2007 1:00 AM
I thought it would be fun to shoot time lapse of the Christmas Parade staging. This is a bizarre look at the parade activities. I shot two angles. The first one is on the front of Ocala.com. The second angle is here. Open this entry to read about the project and see Seven hours of parade prep go by in under two minutes. Alan Youngblood, Photo Editor
I just love the Ocala Christmas Parade. It's probably the single biggest event each year in town. I can't think of anything that brings this many people to one place at one time in Marion County. A medievil castle complete with maidens and medievil warriors, a submarine, the Wienermobile and lets not forget Elvis along with all the other normal marching bands and football floats is simply not to be missed.

Lots of things go one in the McPherson complex lot staging before the parade ever begins. The floats start lining up around 8am and get on the lot at 10am. Lots of people finish their floats in the staging area. This is one area we haven't covered in the past mainly because it's simply to difficult to move with the 50,000 people attending and the parade itself. We would park somewhere we could get out quickly and cover a portion of the parade route. Because of deadlines we would need to leave as soon as Santa rode by.

I thought it would be fun to try a time lapse video to show the activity in the staging area and parade moving out. I set up two Nikon D2h still cameras. One on top of the County Commssion building and one on top of the Maintainece bulding on the other end. The time lapse movie you are about to see is actually about 1500 still frames shot about 15 seconds apart.

I set each camera up around 11:30am. The cameras have a bultin option for taking photos automatically at a set interval. I choose 15 seconds. The option will only shoot 999 images before it has to be reset. The timer would time out in about three hours. I wanted to let the cameras go until the parade had left and the field was empty so I would need to have them running about seven hours. In order to do this I needed to reset the cameras after three hours. That's OK because they needed fresh batteries at that time too.

After it was all over, I retrieved everything. I copied the 1500 or so images to folders on my conputer. I pointed Quicktime Pro at the folder and told it to import an image sequence. Within a matter of seconds QT imported the folder full of images and turned it into a movie. I posted the angle off the County Commission auditorium last night. Here's the one from the maintainence building.

    http://www.ocala.com/assets/slideshow/timelapseparadeWeb.mov

Alan Youngblood, Photo Editor
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