Time Lapse Photography (Part 2)

I've had my first few attempts with the timed remote, so here are the results and a discussion about things learnt so far...

The first part on timelapse can be found here: Timelapse Part 1

 Stars

Firstly, I set my 5D2 up on the patio, pointing up at the stars.  I took a few test shots, and determined a sensible exposure of 25 seconds at ISO 1600 (f8) to get the shot exposed with some detail in the sky.  I focussed on the moon and switched to manual focus, and set the timer up to take 96 shots (4 seconds at 24fps), with a 5 second gap between each exposure.  I set the camera quality to Small JPEG at the best quality.  It seems a bit unusual doing this as I normally shoot RAW, but even at 5MP the images are over twice the resolution of full HD video!


The first point to note is the moon.  You can't expose to have both the stars and the moon exposed correctly (as discussed earlier), so I kept the moon out of shot.  However, the moon was off to the left of the camera, and it was a full moon, so there's a massive amount of light cast over the sky - you can see this in the video.

Secondly, the curtains to the lounge are fairly thin and let a lot of tungsten filament light out (orange).  Along with the neighbours security light flicking on and off occasionally, this leads to lots of strange flashes and casts in the video.

I should point out that I was aware of all these problems before I started - this was my first ever timelapse (at least with a DSLR!), and the best way to learn is to get out and try something, and learn from the results.  Here's the result:


Stars Timelapse from Rich Meston on Vimeo.

Constructing the Timelapse Video

When you set the remote trigger up with the camera and let it run, you end up with a load of images.  In my case, it was 96 JPEGs, each about 500KB.

The next step is to construct a video file - I tried several free applications, then figured out you can do it with Pemiere Elements by importing all the image files and dragging the lot to the timeline.  I selected the option to create a slideshow group, set them up to show for 1 frame each and removed any delay in between the images (the default settings are to create a cross-fading slideshow).

I exported at 30fps, 720p MPEG, which gave me an m2v file with a size of 3415KB.

I ought to point out at this point that whilst I have played around with NLE (non-linear editors) for video before a little, I have an awful lot to learn!  So the methods described here are my first attempts at getting things going...

I created my account at Vimeo and uploaded the video there - and that's what you see above.

Clouds

The next day, I was going out for a fairly big chunk of the middle of the day and taking the 5D2 with me, so I set the 40D up with a charged battery and the 24-70 lens pointing out of an upstairs window.  This is an angled velux window and it's not the cleanest at the moment, so there are marks on the video that you can see which are dirt and possibly some reflections too.


I wanted to capture cloud movement, so I set the camera up on Av (aperture priority), f11, 100 ISO, small JPEG, and set the timed remote to take an unlimited number of pictures, with one shot every minute:


Clouds Timelapse from Rich Meston on Vimeo.

It's not the most interesting sky, but you can see the effect.  I think the clouds were moving a bit fast for a once-per-minute shot, and I possibly should have set it up to every 30 seconds or maybe faster.

This was composed of nearly 5 hours of shots (around 280 frames), and the main thing I noticed was that the battery was almost dead by the end, so that's about the limit of a non-gripped 40D in a warm environment.  I think by switching off any preview images and reducing the power down timeout I might get a bit more out of this, but if the camera was outside in the cold then the time would drop considerably.  I guess if you want to do long timelapses, you either need a grip or an external power supply...

Things to Consider

Here's a summary of things to consider with further timelapses:

• Make sure the battery is fully charged, and consider what a sensible timeframe for the timelapse will be when thinking about battery life
• Watch out for external, uncontrollable lighting (e.g. security lights, curtains moving etc) when doing night timelapses.  Ideally, I think you want to be out in the middle of nowhere for star timelapses.
• The moon is very bright!  Night timelapses probably want to be done on either a moonless night, or with the moon behind (unless the moon is the focus or the source of lighting of course).
• Unless you have specific reasons for big files, you might as well use the best quality but smalled JPEG output format of the camera.  This makes for easy construction of the video, and still gives you some crop room even for HD video (assuming the file is greater than about 2MP).
• The interval will change the effect of the video.  I think it's going to take time to get a feel for what is sensible intervals for things like stars and clouds, but that's the fun of playing around!