Alex Wise Photography

Now to the guts of it

For a time-lapse, location is important as what’s the point in taking one in your backyard on a sunny day? You want to capture movement of something interesting. I’d recommend long exposures of traffic, waterfalls, busy urban areas where there is alot of people moving, sunsets, and so fourth.

Once deciding what you’re going to shoot and are all setup and good to go it’s time to decide set your camera up ready to go.

Because I was shooting manual with no aids to shoot the camera on intervals such as a laptop I had to rely on my stop watch and I would click the exposure with my remote every interval, boring. So I would recommend you get a laptop out and use the remote shooting program which came with the Canon cd so you don’t go nuts like mwa. It appears that sitting somewhere clicking a button every 20 seconds for 45 minutes does strange things to people.

For my shots I exposed the location in AV mode under a focal point that I was using then used that exposure in manual mode for every shot of the time-lapse. This is quite obvious but for those un-aware if you’re shooting in AV mode then there will be a slight change of exposure depending what you’re doing and this will be visible in your time-lapse. Instead you want consistency which also means that the camera focus needs to be set to manual and the same with the white balance.

I’d explain shooting intervals but why when my dear friend wikipedia has it all sorted

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-lapse

comprende?

Now you should have a fair few jpeg images saved somewhere and are creaming your pants as you look through the sequence so this means it’s time to compile them. My weapon of choice is Apple Quicktime Pro as it has a image sequence feature which you select your images, sit back and viola. I’m sure there is other good options available but this is so easy. You save the sequence and you’re done. Open sit back and enjoy your masterpiece.

Once you’re done you can do what I did and compile them in Adobe Premier and add some fancy tunes and some text so every kid on the block knows its yours. Just keep at it but don’t go too hardcore as these digital camera’s of ours have a certain amount of exposures which they fire before they go kaput. Some fire more or some fire less, just a heads up.