LA time-lapser Alex Hallajian
Make sure to watch all videos in HD!
We recently lent LA time-lapser Alex Hallajian a photoSentinel Pro to trial capturing shipping container activity at Port of Long Beach.On the left you’ll find the uncut photoSentinel footage, above you’ll find Alex’s final time-lapse movie, and below you can read what Alex had to say about the photoSentinel experience.
For years, time-lapse photography was relegated to photographers with engineering and DIY technical know-how. Recently, however, time-lapse has rapidly evolved into the wide market of sliders, motion-control heads and even cameras with in-built time-lapse capabilities. While there are now great solutions for the problems of smooth motion, flicker and exposure ramping, there remained another tough problem: how do I leave a stationary camera out in the elements indefinitely to capture longer sequences over days, months or even years?
“photoSentinel solves the problem of housing a camera indefinitely and then goes further to deliver additional features which give me the ability to endlessly stretch my creativity.”
During my research, I came across other products that offered various webcam-like approaches to capturing images over time. However, there is nothing like the quality that comes from full raw DSLR photographs. The photoSentinel unit allowed me to have the quality of DSLR images and at the same time protect the camera from all the different weather conditions the port experienced over the months-long time-lapse.
The most amazing feature is most definitely the 3G connectivity and the remote-access control panel. The client would call and let me know there was a schedule change and all I had to do was log-in to the system and adjust the program schedule. This same interface allowed me to check in on the unit and make sure everything was running smoothly.
The client also appreciated the ability to log in to their own client account and observe operations from the camera’s vantage point. The photoSentinel allowed for all of this, as well as uploading each photo to my Dropbox account so I could make short progress time-lapse clips for the client at any time.
photoSentinel has brought together multiple technologies to create a long-term timelapse solution that enables me to captures footage that would otherwise be too difficult to shoot. This, combined with their amazing technical support team, is what makes them the best in the business.