Topic: timelapse photography

[mizary]

I've been doing timelapes for a while now... so I put together a few and put some music behind it... and uploaded it to youtube.

I use my DSLR a Nikon D50... I use camera control pro on my laptop to control the camera and take the pics... then put them together in vegas.

just thought I'd share...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiJpClhShbs

--mizary

[Frank in JC]

I've been doing timelapes for a while now... so I put together a few and put some music behind it... and uploaded it to youtube.

I use my DSLR a Nikon D50... I use camera control pro on my laptop to control the camera and take the pics... then put them together in vegas.

just thought I'd share...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiJpClhShbs

--mizary

Holy crap, that's a lot of still frames to deal with!  Nice... I especially like the way the clouds are peeling off around 2:15. 

[Sanjay]

very very cool.  thanks for sharing.

[phanophish]

very nice stuff.  any tips for us newbies?  This looks like it could be fun to try.  I'm guessing some basics such as manual WB and a fixed exposure for consistency.  JPEGs not RAW? What kind of interval between exposures do you typically use? Also I'm assuming the pans are don in the video editing app, not moving the camera?

[jkmb]

Really cool!  How many frames/stills was that?  Loved the cloud rolls during Walking on Sunshine!

[mizary]

a TON of frames...

lets see...  it was about 3.5min long at 30fps...

so around 6000...  ?

and yeah the zooms/pans are done in post...  I usually do between 3-5sec intervals.

manual WB (you can see I didn't do that on the parking lot shot)
I use aperature priority...  I let the camera pick teh exposure - mainly because I often do sunrise/sunset...  if you are shooting from 2-4pm you should probably do manual exposure to get rid of that flicker when clouds start messing with the amount of light.  But if you expose for overcast and the sky clears you might be too overexposed...

I normally shoot jpegs...  but raw is better.  I did one accidentally raw - but I'd also screwed up the WB so I was able to process all the shots with a diff WB which was nice.  but raw = 5mb an image, jpeg = 1mb an image.  not a big deal when you shoot 200 images at a concert...  a little bigger issue when you shoot 3000-4000 shots of the sunrise.

--mizary

[phanophish]

a TON of frames...

lets see...  it was about 3.5min long at 30fps...

so around 6000...  ?

and yeah the zooms/pans are done in post...  I usually do between 3-5sec intervals.

manual WB (you can see I didn't do that on the parking lot shot)
I use aperature priority...  I let the camera pick teh exposure - mainly because I often do sunrise/sunset...  if you are shooting from 2-4pm you should probably do manual exposure to get rid of that flicker when clouds start messing with the amount of light.  But if you expose for overcast and the sky clears you might be too overexposed...

I normally shoot jpegs...  but raw is better.  I did one accidentally raw - but I'd also screwed up the WB so I was able to process all the shots with a diff WB which was nice.  but raw = 5mb an image, jpeg = 1mb an image.  not a big deal when you shoot 200 images at a concert...  a little bigger issue when you shoot 3000-4000 shots of the sunrise.

--mizary

Awesome info.  Very useful.  I'm going to have to give this a try sometime.  +T

[Outrageous]

a TON of frames...

lets see...  it was about 3.5min long at 30fps...

so around 6000...  ?

--mizary

I was thinking of using a still camera for time-lapse, but then I started thinking about how many exposures the shutter could withstand.  I think your camera may be tested for 150,000 or less.

[rastasean]

A neat little timelapse toy is called the digisnap & it is made by harbortronics.

visit harbortronics.com to learn about the amazing toy. I have the 2100, I think, it is is very customizable to how many frames you want how many minutes, seconds, hours apart. you can also schedule it to take a pic at a particular time.
check it out if you haven't heard of it.

[rastasean]

the little timelapse photography i've does has been pretty easy as far as making it into a video.
I used quicktime pro and you just open an image sequence and then you can choose what frames per second you want and the format to export it. 6000 frames is a lot no matter what but QT could handle it easily.
I really haven't found anything better to use, either.

[gmoe]

really nice work! Thanks for sharing!!

gmoe

[Gutbucket]

Sweet. I especially dig the pans & zooms, nice work.

I used to spend days doing stop-motion and manual time lapse super-8 films. I got bummed when everything went video and you couldn't shoot frame by frame, scratch laser beams and lightning bolts on the emulsion, shoot with the camera upside down then cut & splice the flipped and reversed film to run time backwards, or speed up time with a slot-car pistol grip rheostat wired into the camera motor.  I've figured doing it these days digitally would be a snap, but never seriously thought about it again until today. 

(+T)hanks for the inspiration.