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A first stab at time-lapse

Yesterday, I decided to try time-lapse photography.

I tried to figure out the best place for my camera where I would have power and decided to aim it out my front window.

My camera was on a tripod with a hard line for power. It was tethered to my laptop via Firewire. My computer essentially became the dashboard for my camera. I set all of the settings on the computer screen.

After I was content with my capture settings, I went into the time-lapse (intervalometer) settings. This allows me to set the intervals between pictures and how long I wanted it to shoot. I set it to shoot one picture every 30 seconds for 1,200 frames. That’s ten hours of recording images.

So I let it run. I watched a lot of TV. Thank god there were movies on!

About eight hours into it, I decided that was probably long enough since this was just a test anyways.

So after 900 frames and some heavy compression, here is what I ended up with:

Now I have to go find more things to time-lapse! That is if I’m patient enough!

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One Response

  1. That’s awesome. Do more! The computer setup sounds ideal. Can you possibly do one that takes shots with long shutter speeds? For example, if you were doing a time lapse of a street using long shutter speeds (with appropriate filter/iso/iris for exposure of course) the pictures would leave out fast moving objects like cars, and you could get a timelapse of the scene without the human commotion. I think that would be interesting just to see a vista change over time. Of course seeing the little blinks of activity is also neat, but what I just described I haven’t seen anybody do.

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