First off, I want to give credit where credit is due.

My idea to do this type of blog was inspired by Philip Bloom. I was amazed at his knowledge and his style of shooting. I was very impressed with his website. He not only produces excellent content and imagery, but he explains his technique in his blogs. He is a teacher as much as he is a great shooter and editor. His website is located at http://www.philipbloom.net.

Another friend of mine, TJ Powers, gave me the idea of using a telescope motorized pan head to shoot panning time lapse. I thank them both for getting my head outside the sports television viewfinder.

Now let me talk about my short, “Day Game”.

I set up this time lapse in the very same spot I set up my first Fenway Park time lapse, “One Day at Fenway”. This time, I had fixed my back focus and I was shooting a day game. I ran the camera off the supplied ac power adapter. I had to plug it into the utility power in my hard camera because they never installed an outlet on this roof!

I pointed my hard camera at the time lapse so that I could keep an eye on it from inside the TV truck just in case someone wanted to mess with it.

I framed for the sky, hoping for sweet cloud movement, but got stuck with total and infinite deep blue.

This is a shot of the bracket I bought for 2 bucks at Home Depot. I pulled the telescope off and tossed it in the closet. I only wanted the pan head. The telescope model is the Celestron 114 GT telescope. It has a key pad that I can use to program the pan speed and it runs on eight AA batteries.

This is the controller that came with the Celestron telescope. I use this to dial in the pan speeds. This pan head was designed to follow the stars in the sky as the Earth rotates. I had to figure out a way to make it work for my application. It was easy. I just set the rate to “one” and press the right arrow. I then unplug the CAT3 cable from the pan head (unplugging the keypad) and the pan head continues to pan very very slowly on its own. The only way to stop it is to unplug the battery pack. I like this method because it removes one more cable from the pan head that could get tangled up during the six hour time lapse pan. I cannot tilt with this due to the weight of the camera rig.

The fans have entered the ballpark and are enjoying the game. The pan head has moved about 100 degrees so far and is pointed into right field. I had started at the green monster about three hours ago! It moves kinda like the hour hand on a watch dial.

This was an ideal place to preform the long time lapse because I could keep a close eye on the camera and yell at the drunk fans as they tried to rest a full beer on the top of the Letus!

I have learned this about drunk baseball fans: They all want to be on TV and the way they break the ice is by asking, “...is this game on TV?”

The key to ending a conversation with a drunk while you are trying to shoot a baseball game is to ignore them. If you yell at them, they get angry and if you talk to them they never stop talking and become your best friend.

I never had to deal with this in my last 8 years at Fenway. I had this entire roof to myself! When they added these new seats, they added a bunch of curious fans who sometimes are not interested in the game. But man can they drink.

I digress...

I mentioned in my video description that I had some trouble with my Letus motor. This is a shot of the ground glass inside the Letus. I had opened up the Letus before to adjust the back focus. I had to tug on this 16:9 piece of frosted glass and pull it out (from it’s three points) a fraction of a millimeter to gain infinity on my film lenses. I also open this thing up to clean it out as dust tends to collect on the ground glass.

I knew that the motor was just below the GG. So in order to get the motor spinning, I tapped it with my finger and on she went, vibrating the ground glass to produce a clean film-like image. This little piece of info just might help you out if you own a Letus Extreme or plan on buying one.

Email me with specific questions and I will try to help you.