Euro Trip 2013, Part 4: French Riviera

After a week hiking through the Alps, we were ready for some beach time. From Chamonix, we went straight to the airport in Geneva and took a quick flight over to Nice. Our plan was to spend one night in Nice, two in Monaco, and another back in Nice before heading out.

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We spent some time in both Nice and Cannes, exploring each city as much as we could, but I think we really enjoyed Monaco the most. It was the prettiest of the three and was more our speed. We found a few amazing restaurants, including a tiny one run by a married couple that had an affinity for all things Japanese. And gambling in the Monte Carlo Casino was pretty slick too. 

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We had a blast in the Riviera, but it was a little crowded while we were there and I was definitely ready for ten days in our next destination: Spain!

(To read Parts 1-3 of our Euro Trip 2013, click on Archive at the top of the page.)

Weekend in Paradise

Inna and I have made trips to the Bahamas for two years in a row, including an engagement trip just about a year ago. And with my mom’s birthday being yesterday, we decided to bring her along this time for a birthday present, making this our third year in a row to Paradise Island.

We flew in direct from Atlanta on Friday morning and strolled around the property a bit, checking out the beautiful aquarium they have. We then walked down to the beach for a while and then, of course, headed to the casino where we proceeded to get our arses kicked.

We really didn’t do a whole lot while we were down there. Just ate, gambled, and hit the beach. Had some crappy weather on Saturday, but Sunday was gorgeous and we got lucky with a beautiful sunset. 

I really love this place. If you can get down there, do it. The property is enormous and beautiful, and despite being cut off from the main land, there’s actually quite a bit to do there. It’s a great place to visit, whether you have kids or not. 

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Behind the scenes of my time-lapse video, "Destination"

I’ve played around with time-lapse in the past, but I’ve never put together an entire video. So while I was in Destin, Florida for a few weeks, I decided to give it a go. 

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Shooting the time-lapse itself was a blast. I decided to make it a tilt shift video, so it was fun to try and find subjects to shoot that might look good as miniatures. Unfortunately, some of the angles weren’t ideal for tilt shift, and some of the shots were too close up to the people, so they didn’t quite look as miniature as I wanted. 

I think my favorite shots are the single anchored boat and the woman sitting by herself on the pier. That lady looked a little down, and she definitely had some things on her mind, so it was kind of interesting to watch her sitting there. 

In all, I think I had about 13,000 stills that I took that day. Obviously, I didn’t use a lot of them for this video. Some had horrible flickering issues, some had bad angles, and others just didn’t make for good tilt shift shots. Speaking of which, the sequences from the boat ride were also some of my favorite, but obviously were not tilt shift. I ended up taking a shot every second, not knowing how long it was going to take us to get to our destination, but it ended up being way too many shots. So I had to set the time lapse for 30fps and I still ended up cutting out about 75% of that entire boat ride. 

The flickering was my biggest issue while editing this in post. I couldn’t figure out a good way to solve this issue, and after reading a ton of tutorials and reviews on deflicker plug-ins, I came across a solution. It wasn’t the quickest way to solve this problem, but it did help a lot. A gentleman named Chris on the timescapes.org forum wrote up a Photoshop script. I tried it out and it worked pretty well for most of my sequences with flicker, but not all. However, I will say that I probably didn’t use it to its fullest potential, so it may work even better than it did for me (I was in a rush because I wanted to get this done before I left Atlanta for three months to go to Europe). So here’s a link to the thread with the deflicker script. Make sure you read the entire thread because there are multiple versions of this script available for download, each one an improvement on the previous one. 

At any rate, I had a blast making this video. I know I probably missed some steps somewhere, either while shooting or in post, but I’m planning on doing a lot of these in the future, so hopefully I’ll become more efficient and put out better quality in the end. I hope you guys enjoy this one and please let me know if you have any questions or suggestions on how I could’ve done something better. Thanks for watching!

(By the way, the gallery above are frame grabs from the video itself, so apologies for the quality. The uncompressed still shots were actually pretty nice.)

Went to the Bahamas. Got engaged. Oh, you know, just another typical weekend.

So after being with my beautiful Inna for a year and a half, I decided to pop the big one this past weekend. I booked a trip to Atlantis in the Bahamas a few weeks ago as a “Valentine’s trip.” Little did she know! 

Everything worked out perfectly. Didn’t lose the ring on our way down there, had an amazing sunset with an unexpected visit from the moon in the background, and we even got a nice little engagement jackpot from the Wheel of Fortune slots. Overall, I’d say it was a pretty damn good weekend.  

Oh, and I took some photos while we were down there as well.

To my amazing fiancee and future wife, I love you with all of my heart!image

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