Jun/090
Time lapsing the afternoon away
The view out of my window this afternoon. You can catch a glimpse of the neighbors hanging out and cutting the grass. It was such a nice afternoon, everyone was out in the village. Then the weather came in and there was a little thunderstorm before dark. Also, as you can see, Tia the cat managed to get in the movie. She's such an attention junkie.
Time lapse photography is quite difficult to do. It's exactly like taking a photograph and having to wait 6 hours for the shutter to go click. Obviously a tripod is used. And a video camera which takes high definition resolution pictures at a fixed interval. And you need to be near a plug socket because the camera's battery will die after a few hours. So once you've set everything up and you think the camera is pointed in the right direction, you can forget about it for a while. But you'll wish you adjusted the focus,white balance or just framed the damn shot better for that entire 6 hours.
When you've finished the photography bit & turned the camera off, you simply compile the photos together Video usually uses a frame rate of 25 frames per second. But it doesn't have to. 15 fps is quite fast enough and saves bandwidth. So I've got 508 images taken 1 second apart. At 15 frames per second I get about half a minute of time lapsed shot. I could batch edit those images in photoShop to tweak colours and cropping etc, but 500 high res images take a while to crunch. So I open up an Image Sequence in Quicktime Pro (which it's well worth paying for), and then simply export the movie with the compression I want for the web. Done.
