Documenting a road trip

[sputnik]

My last few trips, I've been all about the travel blog leading up to and during my trips. I'll be doing that with gusto on my roadtrip across the States, but I've also been looking at maybe documenting the trip through photos, specifically time lapsed photos, taking a picture at regular intervals through my roadtrip. As long as the camera is pointing the right way the whole time, I think a little 3 minute video say would be an awesome reminder (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3A-unBigvoY)

Anyone done this on their longer road trips, any tips on equipment, set up, etc. I'll be getting a rental, so I won't be able to make any permanent changes to the vehicle.

[Lifemagician]

I've only just stumbled across this thread.... and yeah! I have many short videos of my trips. They are the grandchildren's favourites.

A camera on the dashboard, right in front of me, and just let the road go by. Though I have not done this on the Interstates, but have on many minor scenic roads, and the best one of all is while it was snowing in northern Upstate New York. The ones from the moving car are all at quite slow speeds.

At one point I videod the passing of a 173 carriage train. Took forever. But heck! the little ones love the train. Another is of a rattle snake in Zion.... right by our feet. I have an 8 min video of it.

Lifey

[sputnik]

Thanks Lifey, can you share a little more info - what sort of camera are you using and how is attached to the dash?

[Lifemagician]

Strictly a point and shoot here. Cigarette packet sized camera, no viewfinder, set it to movie, press the button and it goes. It ain't attached to the dash... I just hold it down on the dash in front of me, when I am travelling slowly on scenic roads.

Unless of course, like the train and the snake, where I was not in the car.

I am not a photographer... know precious little about photography, but going by the principle that if you take enough photos some are bound to be good, has given me some fantastic shots. The videos are purely for me and the grandchildren. Wouldn't have a clue how to upload them. Just great memories. When I play the video of Niagara Falls, and I hear the falls, I relive that visit. None of these are more than about 3 - 5 mins.... except the train, I think that goes for much longer.

Sadly, that camera has died.

I now have a Casio (the last one was also a Casio) H20G for my next trip. Check it out.

Lifey doesn't take it seriously

[BillBauer]

I found this site, and your message, as I was trying to answer the same questions as you, sputnik.

The one thing I learned so far is that you may want a camcorder with a Wide Angle Lens. When you are trying to document the scenery and end up missing 50% of the scenery, it feels frustrating.

I would like to have create a video of a road trip that will take about 200 hours to complete. I am not sure whether I will be able to do this.

There are two approaches one could take - using the time lapse feature, or shooting the video and then speeding up later. The quality of the former is lower, but it has the advantage of lower memory requirement. I tried using time lapse (shooting one image per second, so this speeds up time about 30 times). If one slows down the resulting video, it is watchable, but surely the quality would be better if one could take a picture two or three times per second. Unfortunately, I can't find any cameras that allow one to take more than 1 image per second. :(

Most cameras with wide angle lens don't give you the option of shooting low quality videos (the quality of those low quality videos would still be better than the quality of the time-lapse clips shot in HD). But to shoot 200 hours of videos at higher quality requires over 500 Gb of memory. I am not sure I am prepared to buy an external hard drive, every time I go on a road trip.

Thank you for reading my post. I would really appreciate any suggestions you may have.

[sputnik]

Tks for the reponse (and pm) BillBauer. No, I'm not really any closer to working out how to do this. I know that if I do it, it's going to be costly (a new DSLR, memory cards, an intervalometer, etc) and I'm not sure if a) I'd ever watch the result or b) do it again. So I'm in wait and see mode at the moment, but any and all advice gratefully received.

[irishcaptain]

For timelapse the best solution is the slr with a remote timer triggering the shutter...depending on what exactly you want to shoot it can fire off every few seconds.... It's tricky to do properly, but fun trying! Here's one I tried in Monument Valley last September, almost 15000 pictures were taken, and it probably took longer to figure out how to put it together after - http://www.vimeo.com/15592593

I'm a massive fan of the Panasonic Lumix point & shoot cameras, as they have 720HD video mode and the expensive models have up to 12x optical zoom, so it's just like a small camcorder. I'll never use a proper camcorder again after using the lumix for our 3 week road trip - footage here - http://www.vimeo.com/15624436

[Mark Sedenquist]

Nice video, you can also post video here if you want. Nice work though!

Mark

[DanaCleg]

We had literally hundreds of short videos from vacations. I finally took them all & used WMM and created nice transitioned longer movies and burned them to DVD. The kids watch them frequently. Most of our "moving" video was taken by my son with his Rebel X Si and it makes fantastic video (even at high speed). To share our trips with friends and family I created coffee table-like books & had them printed. Folks love to look at them when they visit. So do I! This link (should) show one of our earlier trip books.
http://www.heritagemakers.com/projec...Sponsor=201705

[Lifemagician]

Wow Dana, that is fantastic. What more can I say?