First time-lapse experiments

[Ray Morgan]

Last week a friend of mine lent me a DVD of Baraka, a visually stunning "non-verbal feature," which inspired me to spend the weekend making my first attempts at time-lapse photography. Thought there's quite a bit to learn, it's not really that difficult.

First the gear:

• Canon 5D-II
• Canon 17-40mm f/4 L
• TC-80N3 shutter release/timer
• tripod

Here are the results of my first experiments:

Time Lapse Experiments - a set on Flickr



A few lessons learned:

• Motion blur is your friend; it makes the motion flow more smoothly. I need to do some more tinkering, but I believe that the ideal exposure time is just shorter than the interval between frames. So, for example, if you're shooting one frame per second, a 0.8-second exposure would be ideal.

• Doing any kind of video work on Linux is no fun. Though I'm a huge fan of it, the video utilities for Linux just aren't anywhere near what they are for Macs and PCs. I definitely did it The Hard Way.

• A super-steady (i.e., heavy, solid) tripod is a must, just like it would be for video, and in fact it's probably more critical than for shooting video.

• The finished product really needs music, which I didn't do on the samples above.

Now that I have the basic mechanics of it down, I have some more creative ideas to try.

More to come...

 

[TheGenericusername]

very cool although the fireworks made it seem wayyy fast. so what programs did you use to create the time lapse

 

[Ray Morgan]

I used an app called dvd-slideshow to stitch the frames together, and while it works well and gives lots of control, it's agonizingly slow.

I agree that the fireworks go awfully fast, but that's shooting at one frame per second, which is as many as the timer can do. I could slow the frame rate a little, or compute intermediate frames, which would slow it by half, which might make it a better show.

 

[KmH]

Looks like a butt-load of work to me.

Kudos for stepping up to the plate and bringing it all to fruition. :thumbup:

 

[Moglex]

Nice!

I may try that at a somewhat slower framerate with a leaf or flower opening.

 

[GeneralBenson]

Pretty awesome. Makes me want to try it. Except I'm lazy.

 

[Garbz]

Love it. But the finished product really needs variety, not music. Admittedly I doubt you were interested in giving up your seat just so you can get some different angles of people walking around before the fireworks started

Very nice work.

 

[Ray Morgan]

Thanks Garbz. I think you're right about variety - anything more than five to ten seconds of footage from each location is probably too much. Shooting time-lapse with a moving camera is a whole other skill, which is what I'm going to try next.

 

[Ejazzle]

that was cool!!