Time-lapse Photography - Photography with Imre - Episode 36
Well the highly anticipated time-lapse episode is done and ready to be enjoyed! This show turned out awesome and I'm glad I put up with the crappy weather to do the time-lapse movie of city skyline for this program; it worked perfectly as an example. One day when I have more time and the weather is more cooperative, I'll go back to the hillside and do a proper one with a nice slow pan and likely using a two second interval. So do enjoy the show and now I have to write two blog posts as I haven't finished the copyright one yet! L8r!
Can I know how to do a time lapse from evening time to night time? How am I going to set in my DSLR? Can you explain more? Thanks
ReplyDeleteHi Pentaxguyz! Sorry for the late response, I've been terribly busy lately.
ReplyDeleteHopefully this helps you out a little and this is how I would approach such a task:
1. First I'd determine when the sun rises and sets for a particular day. Usually your local weather office's website has this information aside from a few other places.
2. Next I would determine how long I want my movie to run for (e.g. 30 seconds). This way I will know how many frames I need to shoot. At 30 frames per second (fps) I would require 900 frames (or images).
3. This is probably the trickiest thing, but I would need to pick a location to setup my camera. For one, I would like a location that I find inspiring and pleasing, as well as safe and/or comfortable as I will be with my camera for many, many hours (unless I choose a safe enough area where I can leave the camera unattended).
4. This step can actually be done earlier (perhaps should be) but once everything is setup you can calculate what time interval you'll need based on how long the day is and how many frames you want to shoot. For example, let's say the day lasts 12 hours. There are 720 minutes in that time period and I wanted 900 frames. So 720/900 = 0.8 minutes or 48 seconds.
5. Because there will be a huge difference in available light (dark, then lighter, then bright midday to evening light, back to darkness + add in variables like clouds blocking the sun now and again), putting the camera to a single exposure will not work very well. Thus, you might very well just need to trust the machine's meter and let the camera decide what the exposure should be. Thus, in such a case I would put my camera into aperture priority mode, probably selecting something like f/8. Of course this way the camera would select the appropriate shutter speed. In addition, I personally would keep the ISO at 200 and the metering to center weighted (on my camera I find that this mode produces exposures that don't vary as much as if I use area metering; this could help reduce pics that are highly over or under exposed).
If any issues would appear, such as a frame or two being over or under exposed a little, then I would try correcting that in an image editor or video editor (depending on what exactly needs to be done). I hope this helps you out but feel free to ask more questions if you need to. Best of luck to you!