In this episode I'll show you how to shoot time-lapse photography.
AdoramaTV presents Exploring Photography with Mark Wallace.
Hi everybody and welcome to another episode in Exploring Photography, right here on Adorama TV,
brought to you by Adorama. It's the camera store that has everything,
for the beginner photographer all the way to the advanced professional.
You can check them out at Adorama.com.
Well today's episode we're gonna be talking about
time-lapse photography. Quite simply that's just taking a series of photos with your camera,
and putting them together in a video editing software of some sort,
and creating a video. We'll do this for things that take a long period of time,
we can take that long period of time and smush it
down into a short little video. So, something like watching the sun come up,
or maybe watching a flower grow,
something like that. So we're gonna show you how to do that. We're gonna take two episodes
to show you how to do that.
Today, we'll show you how to set your camera up and shoot everything and then in the next
week's episode of a show you how to do all the post production stuff.
But before we get to all that I want to remind you that Adorama has some great
photo contests and you can win some awesome prizes so click the link
and enter today!
Well to get started with our show you everything you need to shoot time-lapse
photography really at the heart and soul of everything is this thingy.
This is called an 'Intervalometer', just a fancy word for saying,
you can hook this up your camera and it will take pictures at a set
interval, and that's really the key to shooting time-lapse videos.
So these come for every camera brand imaginable, and a lot of cameras even have
an intervalometer built in. A lot a Nikon cameras specifically,
so check your user manual you might have that built-in, it might be under Intervalometer, or
time-lapse. But what you do with this guy here, is you'll set the
internal for shooting and the rule of thumb is if something takes a long
period of time, like
watching a flower grow, or a rose bloom, something like that or maybe shooting the
construction of a skyscraper,
well you need a long interval. So something like an hour or a
day and you can set that on this. You can say, hey shoot one picture every hour, or one
picture every day.
Or for something that works much faster, like cars zipping by, or
pedestrians, or maybe the sunrise, you'll want to shoot with the shorter interval
something like
one shot every second, or one shot every three seconds.
That's usually we want to start when you're starting to shoot time-lapse videos,
you shoot around once every second or two. So this guy right here
intervalometer will set the duration. For the videos that
I shot, the sunrise I shot one shot every three seconds,
and for the traffic I shot one shot every second,
just to give you an idea. But you have to play with that to make sure you have the
interval that works for you. Once you've got your intervalometer and you've figured out your
interval, you need to set up your camera and are some basic things that
you need to do.
The first thing is, once you have your composition set, you'll get everything
set, you need to manually focus your lens
once you're in focus make sure it's on manual focus.
You don't want your camera to be trying to focus with every single shot,
you're going to be shooting hundreds and hundreds of shots, so wanna make sure it's on manual focus.
The other thing you want to do, is you wanna make sure that your camera is not on
auto IS0. Because as the light changes over time, maybe the sunrise or the
lights changing during the day,
You don't want your ISO to be changing, you want it to be constant to control the noise.
So I usually set mine around ISO 100 or 200,
or if I'm shooting late at night, I'll set that much higher 800 or 1600,
it depends on your light. But make sure your ISO is set to something
constant. Now as far as the mode,
I like to shoot my time-lapse videos in aperture priority mode.
Now there are two reasons for that. The first, is I want to set a constant aperture,
I usually shoot around F10,
but it doesn't matter, whatever you choose. I don't want my depth of field
to be changing, so an aperture priority mode, my aperture is set ,my
camera is set on a certain focal length, so my depth of field is going to stay consistent,
and then as the lighting conditions change, well my shudder will be changing
to compensate for that, and so my camera setups sort-of in auto mode
to change with the lighting,
but it's not going to affect my dept of field at all.
So, aperture priority mode, manual focus, I have my intervalometer with my
interval set and everything is set up. A couple more things that will really
make a big difference
to your time lapse photography. They're gonna be shooting hundreds, if not thousands
of pictures, so make sure
that you have a fully charged battery. Now, if you're shooting those long long durations of
days or weeks, you need to make sure you have your camera plugged into
an outlet in the wall. So you have to have an AC converter, so make sure
you have plenty of juice.
The other thing I do on my camera, is I'll go into my menu
and I'll make sure that I'm shooting in large jpeg mode. Now I know I say all the
time to shoot in RAW, always shoot in RAW,
this is one of those exceptions for me, and the reason for that, is if
I'm shooting one-shot every second, well the buffer on my camera just can't keep
up with that kind of shooting,
and is going to take up an amazing amount of space, and when we get to
post-production
you'll see that you might not wanna have to process all those raw files. For me,
shooting large jpegs is going to make a big difference.
The other thing I want to do is, I want to make sure my my battery lasts a long time.
So there is an image review that usually comes up after you take a picture, it shows
up on LCD screen,
I turn that off completely so it's not draining the battery, I'm not going to look at
every single picture for hours and hours.
Also I'm going to shut off the beep that goes off with the
focus. I know we are in manual focus, but on some cameras your camera will still beep
if it sees that it is in focus. So I just shut that off because it is sort of annoying for me.
So all that stuff is set up.
The last thing I have to mention is, you have to make sure that you have a good sturdy
tripod. Your camera needs to be set and composed,
and your composition needs to be set to make sure nothing moves,
you need to make sure you have a good tripod. Now there are exceptions to that rule, Matt Hill
is an artist that shoots a lot of time-lapse videos, hand-held. You can see
some of his stuff on how they do that. We talked about how he does his stuff but
for the most part you need a good
tripod. So on a lot of cameras there is an actual level that shows up on the LCD
screen, so I highly recommend you use that
when composing your image, because that way you make sure everything is level
everything is good, and when you bring your images out of the camera
and then you're not going to have to do a bunch of corrections. Right, now all that is set up
once you get everything done, on your intervalometer there is this little button
that says start/stop, you push that, and
your cameras gonna start snapping photos and you'll get several hundred
if not several thousand photos as your watching your sun rise, or your flower grow,
or your building
being built up, whatever it is. Once all that's done you need to take those
photos
throw them into post-production and create your video. That's what we're going to do
in the next episode. So this episode was how to set it up, and how to shoot.
Next episode, we're going to show you how to edit the stuff in 'After Effects' to get some really amazing
results. Well thank you so much for joining me in this episode don't forget
to tune in next week
to see how we take all these images and we do the post-production.
Don't forget to subscribe to AdoramaTV, it's absolutely free
and that way you won't miss a single episode. Speaking of episodes, there's
another episode about time lapse, and stop action photography that I did
and you find that the Adorama Learning Center it goes into great detail on
frames per second, and all kinds of stuff.
So you might want to check that out, that's the kind of stuff you can see here Adorama TV,
so make sure you subscribe. Thanks for joining me and I'll see you again next week.
Do you great-looking prints at low-cost? Be sure to visit our
easy to use online printing service.
Adoramapix has professionals who treat your images with the utmost care that you can count on.
For quick turnaround on photos, cards, or albums
use Adoramapix.com