Nothing screams spring like opening day of Major League Baseball. As a lifelong Mets fan it's been my privilege to attend the last 4 opening days at Citifield and help to capture some of the festivities. Even on a day that was gray and damp, I couldn't help but smile. It didn't hurt that the Mets won 9-4 against a team that I grew up hating....

I captured the images that this timelapse is made up of using my Nikon D850 and the 8-15 fisheye. All motion was controlled via the Syrp Genie Mini. All images were shot in the NEF (Nikon Raw) file format and converted after to Jpgs. This is a heavily compressed 1080P version because of the limits of my blog. II exported the files ready for 8K but I don't have a way to process that currently. Gotta love the D850. The one thing that I will add when I do the final product is sound. Since I shot this yesterday and wanted to share I haven't had time to try to find music that really works for me but I will. Triple Scoop Music has such a large collection of music that I really couldn't find the piece that I thought best. 

The process of trying to create timelapse can be hit and miss as you try to make sure that you get smooth action and movement while maintaining the security of your gear and praying that you get action that is interesting to the end viewer. When I shoot a timelapse in the desert or an abandoned building I can just walk away for a bit or take a nap if i like. Hard to do when surrounded by a sell out crowd. The other obvious issue is that you are really hoping for natural movement such as clouds or other motion. The 45000 people certainly helped to create dynamic images even though the sky would not cooperate. I had to underexpose the sky by 4 stops for some of these shots to get even a hit of cloud movement. Again - thank the camera gods for the D850 and it's dynamic range. 

I really enjoyed the smaller pieces such as the sausage stand. This was the first timelapse I've ever done this way where I knew I had multiple shots I wanted to edit together for the final project and all this did was whet my appetite. Next time I'll hopefully bring more than one camera in order to capture multiple views of the same scene at the same time to allow for more creative editing. 

The Syrp really helps give me something slightly different and for 250 dollars it's become invaluable to me when I decide to take on these types of projects. I wish i could use it in combination with the silent shutter mode the D850 brings to the table when I'm controlling the timelapse internally but it's a worthy trade-off for such an inexpensive piece of gear that brings production value to the shots.