Time Lapse Photography–Nico Strydom

I have been interested in time lapse photography for quite some time after seeing it in action on both television shows and on the internet, but I have always been a little hesitant to try it out. After reading a very interesting article about time lapse photography on the internet I decided to finally give it a go.

Time lapse photography is nothing else but to take a bunch of pictures of the same thing over a period of time and then put it all together to create a video that plays back in a shorter period of time.

The first thing I had to do was to purchase an Intervalometer. It is a device that you connect to your camera that triggers the camera to take a certain amount of photos at a set interval. The device can also be used as remote shutter release and is a must have.
Then it was as easy as to follow the 6 basic steps:

Step 1: Choose a subject
I attended a 24 hour mountain bike event over the weekend that requires that you spend the night camping at the event. I knew that I will be awake the whole night and saw it as the perfect opportunity to give time lapse photography a go. What I was looking for, was to capture the sun rise in the morning and to see the rest of the camp site becoming “alive” during the morning. However, I was not so lucky and the weather turned on us over the evening and we woke up to a grey overcast day with no sun in sight. I still wanted to give a bash and I decided to capture the camp activity as the day was starting.

The question that you need to ask yourself is how much time you have to commit to the project. Some time lapse photography subjects need a commitment of days, weeks, months or even years.

Step 2: Figuring it out, in other words, doing the maths
This is all about how many photographs will you require to produce your time lapse movie. It is about the length of time of the event and the length of time of the final product. Most movies show around 20 – 30 frames per second. The more frames per second, the smoother the movie will play back. Now we use the magic formula to determine how many photographs we are going to need and what the spacing of those photographs needs to be.

In my example I knew that I wanted to use 26 frames per second. The event I was photographing really did not have a determined amount of time, so I was not too worried about that. I wanted to create a video that will be about minute long. So, I knew I needed about 60 seconds of photographs and at 26 photographs per second; I had to take in excess of 1500 photographs. Seeing as I was not constrained by time, I decided to take each photo one second apart. Now that I have a plan, I was ready to get to the fun part.

Step 3: Shooting the stills
The secret is to go as manual as possible.

1. The first thing I did was to set my camera to record medium quality jpeg files. You don’t need to take RAW or large jpeg files as the output will be very small in video format and anything bigger will just consume memory space with no benefit.
2. Set the camera’s white balance to manual. Auto white balance can change and fluctuate, especially in a changing light environment. Setting it to manual helps to ensure that the photographs keep a reasonably same look.
3. Set the exposure manually. I did a reading using auto metering and then changed the camera to manual mode and set the aperture and time value manually. I also used the camera’s exposure lock to make sure that the exposure change as little as possible.
4. Now make sure that the batteries are all fully charged and there is enough room on the memory card. Set the camera on a sturdy tripod and start taking those pictures.

Step 4: Edit the photographs
All that is left is to download the photos to your computer, edit them if you want, and, assemble them into a movie.  I used Adobe Lightroom for my photo editing and it makes batch editing of a large amount of photos so much easier. Maybe the exposure or levels could use some work, or you want to adjust the saturation a bit. Try to automate everything and remember to apply the same edit to all the photos.

Step 5: Start making the movie
Again I used the Lightroom Slideshow module for this step, with the preset that was designed and developed by Sean McCormack. It was as easy as to put all the photographs into a collection and using the 24 frames per second preset to export all the photos as a movie. I also added some music to the show in Lightroom, but I still need to learn to do titles and effects. That will come with time.

Step 6: Upload and share
Finally it is just a case of sharing your creation with the world, either through the internet or on some other media that you prefer.  I can’t wait for my next attempt at time lapse photography and it will be a learning process as I go along.

Follow this link to the video on Facebook.

Nico Strydom