TIMELAPSE EXPERIMENT #2: still some bugs to work out
So here’s a second attempt at a timelapse and I’m still learning so please forgive the imperfections.
The biggest bother in this one are the jumps in the image 4 or 5 times in the sequence. I was shooting with a much longer focal length, about 110-120mm vs about 16mm before and I believe I also had the lens on Image Stabilization – the combination of these two were probably the cause of the jumps in the image you see. Even walking by the camera with these settings (on the second floor of wood and brick apartment building where the ground isn’t super stable like the concrete floor of my last apartment) would also explain where the jumps came from… shouldn’t IS keep the image from doing that? Fine vibrations are dampened by IS yes. Bumps or moves near the camera can set off the IS to adjust the image slightly that will appear as vibrations in this timelapse. That’s just a theory at this point – but I’ve worked with this lens long enough that I’m pretty confident that IS should have been off.
Other changes – I shot on large jpeg rather than raw (so I could get more images onto the card for a longer timelapse) – and had the intervalometer set to fire every 5 seconds rather than 15. This smooths out the motion and slows it down compared to my first timelapse but you can still see the trees in the foreground moving around erratically, which I understand can be smoothed out if I use a longer shutter speed to let the motion blur a bit. Next time.
BTW, this was shot through the bedroom window of my new apartment. Nice view huh?
Music is Joga by Bjork.
Oh and don’t forget to hit the fullscreen button to view it in 1080p!
DIG IT: My First Timelapse
Okay so it’s short and sweet, certainly no Sean Stiegemeier, and yes there are things I will do different next time – but hey – my first attempt at timelapse sequence was fun and, I’d say, successful (enough to post it here anyways).
The process for these 11 seconds of ‘wow, neat’ factor took 285 frames from my still camera using an intervalometer to fire a frame once every 15 seconds over the course of about an hour. I then batch processed the lot in Aperture and cropped them down from their native 21 megapixels to 1920×1080 or full HD resolution. Some contrast adjustments, vignette, and the like to give it some pop (as these were stills, I knew how to do this quite easily, whereas I still need some work with color timing video footage). Import the lot into Final Cut, drop it into a timeline with some music, output to a Quicktime movie and voila. I’d say I’m hooked… expect to see more from me in the future.
