Thoughts About Photography

Before you get started, make sure you have the following supplies: A digital camera, a tripod, about 100ft of rope, a second person, and chalk. That’s it!

A. The first thing you need is a large level area with enough room to draw a large circle around the object, let’s say a car, in the center. A parking lot is ideal, but If all you can find is dirt or gravel, you can mark the ground with spikes or nails instead of chalk. Find a spot in the middle of your space and mark it with chalk. This will be the center point of our circle. Anchor one end of your rope to this point or have a friend hold the rope to this point. Tie a piece of chalk to the other end at the distance that you want the radius of your circle to be. Now draw the circle. For this example, I will be doing a half circle. Once you have drawn a circle, each of you stands on opposite sides of the circle and pull the rope tight. Position yourselves so that the center of the rope is directly over the center of your circle. Mark you and your partner’s place on the outside of the circle. These points are the beginning and end of where we will be taking photos. You should have something that looks like this:

B. Now we have to find the point on our circle half way between our start and end points. To do that, think back to your geometry class. Make 2 arcs using the start and end points as the center. Then hold the string from the center of our first large circle through where our two new arcs intersected and mark this point on our original circle. It is easier to show you a diagram than to explain, so this image should clear up any confusion:

C. Now we have a starting point, an ending point, and a middle point. Now we simply mark the points half way between them. To do this, we basically do the same things as step B. It looks like this:

D. Repeat this process of dividing our circle until you have as many points as you need. Since we are dividing the circle equally, the number of points will go from 3 to 5 to 9 to 17 to 33 to 65, etc. The ideal number is probably 33 because that gives you about a second of video at 30 frames per second. A final map would look like this if you were shooting for 33 photos:

E. Now that our map is finished, we are ready to start taking photos. Move your car so that the center of the car is over the center point of our circle. Lock your camera into your tripod, and take one photo from each point on our circle. To make sure that your tripod is in the same position for each shot, have each leg of the tripod sit on the circle and center line like this:

F. Now you should have 33 photos of the car. Each photo becomes a frame in our movie. There are several ways to make a movie. You can use Quicktime Pro to turn the series of images into a .mov, or use Photoshop to create an animated gif. Obviously, you are going to have the background in each shot, so if you want a silhouette like my example above, you are going to need to cut out the vehicle in each frame and replace the background with white. This is quite tedious, but the result is worth it.

Conclusion: I have used this technique for commercial television work with great success. You can see an example of this technique used in a Jayco television commercial I helped with. You should be able to see the spinning RV’s at the bottom of the spot. I hope you find this tutorial helpful. As always, if you end up using my advice, I would love to see the results!