From what I know, this is the first “complete” timelapse of Nicosia. This video is a collection of about half the shots I wanted. I couldn’t cover all the desired locations and produce more shots. After 2 months of shooting, I decided to go with it and finish it. I might create a second one in the future.

Nicosia, known locally as Lefkosia, is the capital and largest city in Cyprus, as well as its main business centre. Nicosia is the only divided capital in the world, with the southern and the northern portions divided by a Green Line. Nicosia has been in continuous habitation since the beginning of the Bronze Age 2500 years BC which was then known as Ledra. On the 14th of August 1974 the Turkish army invaded Cyprus and captured 37% of Cypriot territory including the northern part of Nicosia. Despite that, with a population of 398,293 Nicosia is consistently ranked as one of the richest cities in the world in per capita income terms. Read more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicosia

I wanted to show a not-so-known face of Nicosia, somehow avoiding popular tourist landmarks. Even people who live in Nicosia will have a hard time identifying the locations of all the shots in the video (which imo is a good thing).

I tried to make the video as short as possible. Instead of going the usual route with a classical/chill out music and slow cuts, I decided to experiment with a fast paced edit following a fast-tempo music track.

I also need to get myself a slider! One shot, the one on the rooftop 2:20, took me 2 hours to finish. And it’s not perfect, moving from side to side.

Shot on a Canon 5D MK2 with a Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8 L USM, Tokina 11-16mm f/2.8 lens, graduated NDs 0.3, 0.6, 0.9 and a Hoya 77mm Circular Polariser HD. Post-processed in Lightroom 4.

Music by: The Mad Violinist — Ellie Goulding – Lights (Bassnectar remix) http://youtu.be/H_5j0uzlYfo

You’re my only form of advertisement. Please help me and share this video if you liked it!
I even included a cat to make the video more likeable! :p
Thanks! http://vimeo.com/nicosia

Some stats: 70GB of data, 9445 photos (RAW but mostly JPGS), 49 shots, countless hours shooting, 2 months in the making and 1 Police incident (read about it here: http://alexcican.com/incident).

Thanks for watching!

I was at a big roundabout at the outskirts of Nicosia. I was positioned in the centre of it. Suddenly, a sketchy 4×4 car stops abruptly, near the edge of the road, at the roundabout, behind me.

I turn around, and I see three large dudes in plain clothes — don’t know if they were muscular or fat — getting off and beginning to walk fast towards me. As if that wasn’t enough, just as they were getting off, all three of them put on their hoods.

Rather instinctive I decided to distance myself from the camera which was still shooting, my gear and Lowepro bag, and to begin walking towards them. I later realised that I did this in order to gauge what was going on with these dudes.

If they were thieves, the time it would take for me to realise it, would be reduced and the distance between them and my gear would be big enough to allow me to take action.

As I was walking towards them, and they towards me, I shouted a rather warm message: “Evening, is there a problem?”. Silence. “Speak up, dammit” I thought. The dudes walk a couple of meters more and the guy closer to me asks: “What are you doing here?”. With one foot ready to sprint in the opposite direction I respond that I’m taking some photographs.

Shortly after, they identified themselves as the Police and cooperating, we started walking towards my camera to show them what I was doing.

As I was showing them the images on my camera’s LCD I explained to them what a timelapse was, and that I was shooting the traffic of the roundabout with the moon moving across the sky. Needless to say, the shot I intended to do — moon moving across the frame — was ruined because the camera was positioned very low on the ground pointing upwards. In order to show them the LCD I had to take the camera out of position.

_{The last frame of the epic shot}

Whilst still hovering over me, they asked several other questions like “What’s the purpose of this”, “How I got there?”, “Where do I work”, etc. after which they finally left.

I never had an incident with the Police, let alone plain clothes undercover Police, asking me about my photography intentions. Good thing they didn’t take me to the station!

The irony is that just a couple of minutes before the Police raided me, there were a dude with an RX-8 drifting like he’s in 2 Fast 2 Furious around the roundabout.

This month’s wallpaper features a photograph called “Castle’s Gatekeeper”, taken in Larnaka, Cyprus in 2012.

_{Castle’s Gatekeeper, Larnaka Cyprus}

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_{By downloading and saving this wallpaper, you agree to use this wallpaper only for personal use as a desktop background. Commercial use is prohibited. Wallpaper used as: banners, blog background, social network layout, manipulation, profile picture, avatar, re-uploading on other websites or claiming it as your own is also prohibited. This wallpaper is to be downloaded only from the domain of alexcican.com. All rights reserved by the artist, Alex Cican. Failing to comply with these rules means violating the terms and conditions and could result in prosecution and/or fine.}

The battery life of my iPad 2 has been excellent. Prior to that I had an iPhone 3G that didn’t conserve much battery and in short: it sucked. The advertised battery life for the iPad 2 is of 10 hours on a single charge. That makes it more efficient than any laptop — and most netbooks — on the market. I’ve been able to squeeze 11, even 12 hours on a single charge!

I want to present to you the results of some experiments that I conducted. Aside from the conventional tips for saving battery life, I’ll discuss some other tips I came up with.

Conventional tips for saving battery life

Here are the tips pretty much everyone knows:

• Lower the brightness of the screen
• Switch off 3G and use WiFi when possible
• Switch off Bluetooth when not in use
• Minimise the use of location services
• Turn off push notifications
• Turn off fetch data for mail (or fetch mail less frequently)
• Turn off EQ when listening to songs
• Do less CPU intensive tasks (like watching movies or reading). Don’t constantly switch between apps
• Set to lock the screen automatically (auto-lock)
• Turn off device completely if not used for long time
• Charge battery 100% and let it run completely (shuts down) at least once per month
• Disconnect the device from charger once it has charged completely (thus prolonging battery life)
• Keep the battery within 20% – 80% (avoid discharging and fully charging the battery too often)

Further battery experiments

Aside from those tips I wanted to test some other scenarios and their effect on battery life. I couldn’t find any mentions of these particular scenarios on the Internet so I decided to test them myself. The scenarios that I tested were:

1. In sleep mode: apps running in the background with WiFi on VS apps in the background with WiFi off
2. In sleep mode: apps running in the background VS no apps in the background
3. App left on when in sleep mode VS app minimised (background) when in sleep mode

The apps that were selected for this experiment were: Twitter, Facebook, Flipboard, Mail, Safari. For the Mail app I had “fetch new data” turned off (no mail fetched automatically). All other apps had push notifications enabled. Bluetooth was turned off at all times, location services were enabled and brightness was at a minimum. The tests were conducted over a period of 4 days, with battery life at 70% (charging the battery up to that point throughout the day). All the tests were conducted at night from 12:00AM to 10:00AM (10 hours).

Scenario 1

For the first scenario, it’s better to have WiFi turned off even if you have apps running in the background. When apps were running with WiFi turned on, it consumed 3% of the battery over 10 hours whereas when apps were running with WiFi turned off it consumed around 0.5% (no change in percentage through the night, but once iPad was used for a couple of minutes, percentage dropped faster).

Scenario 2

_{Apps running in the background? Nop, just a list of latest used apps}

Similar to the previous scenario, it’s better to have no apps running in the background but the fact of having running apps in the background consumed very little power (around 0.5% in 10 hours).

I further investigated this issue and it turns up that the iOS “freezes” the app when it’s minimised (background) and little activity is allowed (push notifications). Once you click on the app, it becomes “unfreezed” and fully working again.

So, when double tapping the home button you basically have a list of recently used apps, not a list of running apps in the background. I now, in contrary to the past, find it useless going every once in a while and removing all those apps from that list.

Scenario 3

Even if you leave an app running on screen once the device is put to sleep it has no different effect on battery life than if you were to minimise the app before putting the device to sleep. The main application used in this test, along with the others running in the background, was Kindle.

Conclusion

I hope you found these tests useful somehow. The way I like to preserve battery, aside from the tips expressed in this post, is turning the Airplane mode on when I won’t be using the device for a long time (at night, before going to sleep). This takes care of turning the WiFi and Bluetooth off.

I managed to squeeze even more battery life from my device (up to 12 hours) when reading. The Kindle app has a brightness slider that reduces the brightness of the screen even more. Moreover, it also allows you to set your reading preferences to white text on black background, a preference which should save even more battery. I would love to have those features incorporated in iBooks as well.

When watching an hour-long documentary on YouTube (via WiFi streaming), with the brightness at a minimum and Bluetooth off, the battery percentage only dropped by 7,5%-8%.

Let me do the math for you: 12hours X 8% = 96%. That leaves you with enough battery life to also update your Facebook and Twitter account and check your emails (device is turned off when it reaches 2% battery life).

Finally I found out that when charging the battery, it takes some time for the battery to charge completely, from 98% to 100%. If you leave your device plugged in a bit more it will charge beyond 100% (even if it will say 100%).

Now, if the iPad was more powerful (CPU-wise), I could completely ditch my main bulky workstation that I still use for my photo editing (Photoshop) and video editing (After Effects) needs.

I counted 24 lightnings in 1min 38sec. One of the most awesome thunderstorms I ever witnessed.

I went to an open field to photograph the lightnings (nothing around me for 400m radius) and they were pretty much above me. For the first time I was genuinly scared of being struck by one, so I left in a hurry.

Here are the only “good” photos from that epic night: http://cican.co/z

This video came out more blurry (noise reduction) than what I wanted. Nontheless, it was shot on a 5D MKII at 6400ISO.

This month’s wallpaper features a photograph called “Reed”, taken in Nicosia, Cyprus on the last days of 2011.

_{Reed, Nicosia Cyprus}

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To download the wallpaper select one of the sizes below according to your screen’s resolution. If none of the sizes correspond to your resolution, pick the size closest to it:

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Licence

_{By downloading and saving this wallpaper, you agree to use this wallpaper only for personal use as a desktop background. Commercial use is prohibited. Wallpaper used as: banners, blog background, social network layout, manipulation, profile picture, avatar, re-uploading on other websites or claiming it as your own is also prohibited. This wallpaper is to be downloaded only from the domain of alexcican.com. All rights reserved by the artist, Alex Cican. Failing to comply with these rules means violating the terms and conditions and could result in prosecution and/or fine.}