Time lapse photography
There are many tricks and experiments that can be done with digital cameras, and time lapse is one of them. Time lapse photography is great fun—capturing a time frame using single photos taken at intervals. All these frames are put together to create a short video clip. You don’t need any high-end equipment to do this either—just a digital camera and a few free applications here and there. You also need patience and you need to be specific.
The Requirements
Getting to the specifics, you require a digital camera for capturing the images. You also need a tripod preferably, or a good stationary platform where you can keep your camera for a very long period. You need to download the latest version of VirtualDub (www.virtualdub.org). We’ll be using it to encode the final video. You’ll also need suitable codecs such as Xvid or x264 installed on your PC. If you wish to give your photos a slightly different treatment, then an image editor such as GIMP or even Photoshop will add sparkle to it.
I’m Equipped, Now What?
First select a target object you want to take the time lapse photo shoot of. It could be anything—a busy street, a blooming flower or even a lunar eclipse. Place the camera on the tripod or on a table at a suitable distance from the target you are shooting. Be extremely careful—you must not move the camera from that position at all. Remember that the camera has to be in that position for a really long period, so you shouldn’t be doing a shoot like this on a rainy day.
Setting An Interval
Depending on the type of object of the time lapse shoot, you need to decide an interval, after which the followings shots will be taken. A time lapse of a flower blooming in the morning could happen in 5 hours, for example, so you need a sufficient number of frames to make up a good length time lapse. For a good five second time lapse shot, you would need a good 125 to 150 separate photos if you want a video with a frame rate of 30 fps. In this case, you would need to take a photo every 2 minutes of the object.
Once that is decided, turn on the camera’s image stabilisation feature and use a two-second timer to prevent any shake that might occur with you press the trigger. Now it’s just a matter of time and patience and clicking the photos in time after every two minutes. Make sure you have a sufficiently large memory card and the battery fully charged so you don’t have to disturb the camera anytime. Remember, you don’t need to take photos at 8 MP resolutions. Anything up to 3 MP should be good enough—the final result is going to be a video, not a slideshow. Don’t change any settings between photos.
Creating The Time lapse Itself
Once the shoot is done, copy all the images from the camera to a single folder on the computer. Make sure to delete all previous photos taken on the camera. At this point, you can use Photoshop to adjust or fix any photos that might have shifted.
From here on, things get really simple. Open VirtualDub up and click on File > Open Video File. Make sure the checkbox for Automatically load linked segments is checked. Browse to the folder where the photos are stored and choose the first image of the sequence. Click on Open. Just be sure that the images are numbered properly.
Creating The Video
With the sequence video imported into VirtualDub, its time to select the codec we want to use to export the video. Click on Video > Compression and then select a codec from the list. If you have Xvid, select it and choose the quality or bitrates at which you want the video encoded. If you want a short audio clip, you can add it by clicking on the Audio menu and then on Audio from other file. Select the file and click Open. You can also add some basic effects in VirtualDub by clicking Video > Filters. When you are happy with the clip, click on File > Save as AVI. Choose a location and click on Save.
A quick search for the keywords ‘time lapse’ in YouTube will show up several examples of people trying it with their own digital camera. Along with some very interesting time lapse sequences, you’ll be shocked to find time lapse videos with people who have been taking photos of themselves everyday over a couple of years.Source URL: http://gbejadacosta.blogspot.com/2010/11/time-lapse-photography-there-are-many.html
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