Timelapse photography

Did my first technical timelapse experiment this morning. Not feeling too great yesterday so why not spend an early Sunday morning with some coffee and sun?

Doing this video was actually really fun and it tied together many of the things mentioned here before.

First things first - finding the sun
A sunrise is over quickly and it is vital to be positioned at the right place before the first rays enter the picture. The Photographers Ephemeris is a free application that allows you to see in detail the angle of the sunrise and sunset. This allows you to plan the exact location of where you should stand. As an example - below is the plan I used:

Timelapse gear
Once on site a few things are required:

• Camera (duh)
• Fully charged battery and spare (many shots=lots of energy)
• Tripod
• Plan on final video (length/number of frames etc)
• Coffee, newspaper and patience (will take a while)
• Intervalometer

The last component is key - an intervalometer triggers exposures at regular intervals. As luck would have it, the Magic Lantern custom firmware mentioned earlier is now much easier to use (new release in August) and also includes a software version that is sooo convenient. Works for most of the modern Canon cameras.

Editing
This is all created in Lightroom with the support of another free application called LRTimelapse. The homepage contains several great video tutorials on how to use it and timelapsing in general. Basically, it allows for intelligent and streamlined bulk editing of all settings stored in the .XMP-companion for each RAW-file.

There is also several pre-sets for the video encoding that is really helpful once the output is ready. It is a joy to use and it also allows for correcting the "jitter" that shows up. I still havent really learned how to do all of this yet but there is always a next time.

Lessons learned

• Plan in advance how many shots to take - for 8 fps or 12 fps between 480 and 720 shots are needed for one minute of movie
• Make sure the histogram is shown for each shot - very quickly the highlights will begin burning out when the sun appears
• Get a bean bag or something to remove that motion jitter occuring every now and then
• Protect the lens better - used my polarizing filter now which is not really adequate
• Take even more shots or over a longer time period - it is not a video camera..
• For multiple scenes - take a minimum amount of shots for e.g 20 seconds on screen - that would be 160 or 240 shots
• Shoot in manual mode and make sure white balance is not set to "Auto"
• Read up more on timelapsing techniques on the TimeScapes board
• Spend more time in editing :)

The inspiration for this really came from this video:

Fantastic scenery and he also uses a dolly to create the panning effect. Specifically this dolly, which seems really nice...