Sparkography

As I mentioned in my last post, silly season is in full swing and there are Xmas parties kicking off left, right and centre!

I covered one last week at Sydney’s Luna Park for Mitchell Communications Group – Australia’s biggest media agency. It was a great night and I’ll be posting on that soon, but at the end of an exhausting night of shooting (and partying with them!) I had the task of reviewing around 700 photos and culling them down to a final cut of around 200.

If you’re an event photographer you’ll know how time consuming, tiring and (let’s face it) monotonous this can be. But today I found an amazing alternative solution courtesy of  legendary photog Chase Jarvis. He hosted his own company’s birthday party recently in his studio, and rather than rove around with a camera to shoot his staff, clients and guests, he stuck a 32GB card in a Nikon D3, set it on timelapse and just got everyone to have fun in front of it. Genius!

In just under 5 hours the camera took an incredible 21,112 photos! That’s around 1.5 shots every second!

And the result? A 12 min timelapse video of a great party requiring no sorting, no culling, and no editing! Ok, so DSLRs are capable of shooting HD video these days and he could have just used that facility, but there’s something about timelapse videos that makes them a hell of a lot more interesting and artistic. I think it could be the way forward for capturing events! Check it out:

And read Chase Jarvis’ own blog post.