I really feel almost addicted to making these movies. I know they’re not really any good, but I think they’re interesting (at least). And they’re helping me to understand how to create time-lapse movies, what works, and what doesn’t work.
Yesterday afternoon, I set up my camera and time-lapse equipment on the upstairs patio of my house, pointing at the sunset. Then I let it go, shooting one image every 20 seconds. It was nearly 11 PM when I turned it off. By that time, the crescent moon had set, too.
The resulting video included a lot of blank sky. My exposure was not lengthy enough to capture the stars after sunset, although one very bright star does set with the moon when it finally makes its appearance. I cut the video into two pieces: sunset and moonset. Here they are.
Sunset Time-Lapse
It was a pretty good afternoon for shooting the sunset. In Arizona, we don’t get clouds very often — although this year, our annual monsoon may be starting early. Yesterday afternoon, there were a lot of clouds out to the west — enough to completely filter the sun and give it something to paint with color as it set.
I should mention here that this is the same sky you can see in the time-lapse I did earlier in the day of the saguaro flowers. I just moved the camera upstairs and excluded anything other that the sky (and a tiny bit of a distant tree — darn it!). The only thing I wish is that I’d begun the time-lapse before the sun entered the camera’s frame. I think it would have been more interesting to see it drift in and then set.
I also need to point out that this video (and the one with the cactus flowers) really illustrates what I find attractive about time-lapse photography. It isn’t showing us anything we can’t see on our own. But it’s speeding up the process, making it possible to see motion where we normally wouldn’t. For example, this video is 20 seconds long. I created it using images spaced 20 seconds apart, then put them together in a 15 frames per second video. Do the math: 15 x 20 x 20 = 6000 seconds of real time. That’s 100 minutes. Would you sit still for 1 hour and 40 minutes to watch a sunset? And, if you did, would you see the clouds and sun moving as they clearly are in the video?
Moonset Time-Lapse
I cut out all the boring black night sky to produce this short video of the setting crescent moon. Not terribly exciting, I’m afraid.
One of the things I learned here is to set the exposure manually so all shots are the same. Let’s face it — the brightness of the image shouldn’t change. One exposure should do the trick. If I’d made a longer exposure, I would have had a brighter moon and more stars. And if I’d fixed the exposure to be the same for every shot, the brightness of the moon wouldn’t change from one shot to the next. (I sure hope some more knowledgeable photographers out there will correct me if I’m wrong on this.)
What Do You Think?
I’d love to get your feedback about my time-lapse mania. Are you enjoying them as much as I am? Am I wasting my time? Do you have any specific topics you’d like to see in time-lapse? Use the Comments link for this post or any of the other time-lapse posts to let me know.
I’m really liking this high-quality time-lapse movie creation. It’s fun. Best of all, I can set it up to do a job while I’m home and check the results later.
Today’s experiment came out better than expected. The main goal was to create a time-lapse movie of today’s saguaro flowers closing. (The flowers of the saguaro cactus bloom at night and are wilted and closed by late afternoon.) But I set up the camera to include the sky beyond, which was just filling with clouds. The building clouds stole the show.
If you think this looks good, you should see it in full quality at 1936 x 1296 pixels. That’s the lowest resolution my Nikon D80 can deliver, so that’s how I bring it into QuickTime.
I shut it down when I did for a few reasons:
The camera’s battery was almost depleted. It had snapped 621 images 20 seconds apart.
The wind was kicking up. I worried that a gust could knock over the camera and tripod and damage my camera on the concrete surface of my back patio.
The sun had moved above and behind the cactus. That wasn’t the best lighting for the flowers.
The flowers were just about fully closed.
I’m recharging the battery now. If the clouds dissipate a bit, I may relocate the camera to my upstairs patio and attempt a sunset time-lapse.
If you’re new to this blog or have stumbled onto this page and wonder what the heck this is all about, read “Time-Lapse Mania” to learn more.
Can you still say you’d rather take a tour in an airplane?
Just thought I’d take a moment to share this photo with blog readers. It was taken by Bryan using my Nikon D80 and 10.5mm fisheye lens. He was sitting in the back seat; I was sitting up front with Ryan at the controls. Bryan snapped this shot from between the two seats as we were flying over Lake Shasta in northern California.
Yes, I know we look a bit distorted. That’s the lens in action. But can you get an idea of the view? Huge front bubble window, big side windows. Even the back seats have a great view.
Yet people still take tours of places like the Grand Canyon in airplanes, where they’re lucky to get a limited view out one window.
Cross-Country, Defined
For those of you who are not pilots, allow me to explain the term cross-country as used by a pilot. A cross-country flight is basically any long flight with a landing a certain minimum distance from your starting point. For airplane pilots, it’s at least 50 miles. For helicopter pilots, it’s at least 25 miles. So while this blog entry discusses a very long cross-country flight, we did not fly all the way across the country.
This past Thursday and Friday, I flew by helicopter with two other helicopter pilots, Ryan and Bryan, from Wickenburg, AZ to Boeing Field in Seattle. Bryan and Ryan did just about all of the flying. I sat up front being a nervous passenger when we were near the ground and playing with the radio and GPS. Brian let me make most of his radio calls on the first day, but I didn’t get to do much of that the second day.
It was a mutually beneficial journey. I needed to get the helicopter from Arizona to Washington State. Ryan and Bryan were both CFIs who wanted to build time in an R44 helicopter. It was way cheaper for them to fly with me on this trip than to rent an R44 from a flight school. There was also the added experience of planning and executing a flight through unknown terrain, with fuel stops and an overnight stop along the way. And the money they paid to fly my aircraft helped me cover the cost of this very long and very expensive helicopter flight. Win-win.
A very cool but very helicopter-unfriendly fuel island at Corona Airport in California.
Our flight path took us west, with Bryan at the controls, along state route 60 to I-10, across the Colorado River, and then along I-10 through Bythe, Chiriaco Summit, Palm Springs, and Banning; then back on 60 past March to Riverside on the 91. We stopped at Corona for fuel at what’s likely the coolest but most helicopter-unfriendly fuel island in the world. (We didn’t notice the separate fuel island more suitable for helicopters until we’d stopped and shut down.)
Here’s a video of our transition along the California coast through the LAX airspace on the Shoreline transition route. You might want to turn down the sound while playing it; lots of helicopter noise.
Then Ryan took us west on 91 through the airspace for Fullerton and Long Beach, with a Torrance low pass. (Robinson has entirely too many helicopters waiting for owners on its ramp and in its delivery room.) He then got clearance for the Shoreline helicopter transition of LAX space, which requires the pilot to drop to 150 feet 1/4 mile offshore to pass under LAX departing traffic. We continued following the coast up past Santa Monica, Pacific Palisades, Malibu, Oxnard, Ventura, and Santa Barbara. By then, the marine layer was moving in, so we went inland for a bit. Eventually, we reached San Luis Obispo (and the chatty controller) and stopped for fuel and lunch.
Here’s Ryan on the ramp at San Luis Obispo before departure northbound. I shot this one with my Blackberry’s camera, so pardon the quality.
Bryan was back at the controls for our departure northbound. After a very close call with a large bird, we followed the path of Route 101 northbound. Most of the route was up a riverbed in a very pleasant valley. We got to Salinas and realized that any coastal route would be out of the question — the marine layer was creeping in even there. So we headed over the mountains, eventually ending up in the western part of California’s Central Valley. We stopped for fuel at Byron.
Ryan took over and we continued north over Rio Vista and Yolo, finally hooking up with I-5. We followed that through endless farmland — much of it flooded for a crop that apparently needs lots of water — over Willows Glen and Red Bluff, with more than a few crop-dusters flying nearby at altitudes far below ours. We stopped for the night at Redding, tied down the helicopter, and got a hotel shuttle into town.
We’d flown 8.8 hours.
Ryan at the controls as we near Mt. Shasta in northern California.
The next morning, we were back at the airport at 9 AM, preflighting and getting ready to go. Ryan would start the flight. We headed north along I-5, over Lake Shasta and past Mount Shasta, which was snow-covered and beautiful. We were now past Central Valley’s vast farmland and up in the mountains. We flew past Weed, Siskiyou Co., Rogue Valley/Medford, and Grant’s Pass. Much of this flying was in canyons, along the same route as I-5 and a train line.
Things turned a bit iffy as I-5 swung to the east. We were hoping to go north and catch it on the other side of some mountains, shortening our route a bit, but clouds sitting on the tops of those mountains made that a bit uncertain. So we dropped altitude, slowed down, and followed I-5. Ryan flew while Bryan and I kept a sharp lookout for the power lines we knew — from both chart and GPS — were ahead. We weren’t that low and there wasn’t any real danger, but we were certainly not coming out of that canyon anywhere except the I-5 corridor. We passed the powerlines with plenty of room. The road descended into a valley and we stayed up beneath the cloud bottoms. Eventually, the sky cleared. We continued along I-5 past Myrtle Creek and Roseburg and stopped at Cottage Grove State for fuel and lunch.
Then it was Bryan’s turn again. We continued up I-5 past Hobby, Albany Municipal, and McNary. Then we headed northwest over Sportsman’s, Hillsboro, and Scappoose. We crossed the Columbia River and headed north on I-5 again over Kelso Longview and Olympia, with nice views of Mount St. Helens and Mount Rainier in the distance. Then on to Bremmerton, where we stopped for fuel. We probably had enough to make the last 20 minutes, but why take chances?
Zero-Mike-Lima on the ramp at BFI. Another Blackberry photo. And yes, that’s Mt. Rainier in the background.
I flew the last leg with Bryan up front to handle the radio and give me directions. It was only a 15-minute flight, but the airspace was complicated, so I was grateful for the help. I set the helicopter down sloppily in the parking area. We’d flown a total of 14.4 hours.
It was a great flight. We saw so much that most of it is just a blur in my mind. With luck, these photos and videos will help me remember the trip for a long time to come.
Many thanks to Ryan and Bryan for accompanying me on this trip. I hope they learned a lot about cross-country flying.
An example of one of my old Webcam time-lapse movies.
Let me start by saying that I have always been fascinated by time-lapse photography. There’s something about watching scenes in jittery fast motion that really makes me sit up and take notice.
I’ve played around with time-lapse photography on and off for years. When I had a Webcam, it was easy. The software I used — Evocam, most recently — could handle the creation of the movies automatically. It could also archive them. I’d review a few of the more interesting ones and put them in a blog entry. The best ones were always during Arizona’s summer monsoon, when clouds grew quickly and flew across the sky. You can see other examples here, here, and here.
An Ikea garage shelf assembly project.
I also did a slightly more interesting time-lapse movie of a garage shelf assembly project. In that case, I just put my laptop in the garage, pointed the built-in camera in the area where we were working, and let Evocam do the rest. I was rather pleased with the results.
A week or two ago, one of my Twitter friends — I believe it was SeeTTL — tweeted a link to a video called Eclectic 3.0. I watched it in fascination. Not only was this incredible time-lapse photography set to music, but many of the scenes appeared to use tilt-shift lenses (or tilt-shift faking techniques). Have you seen it yet? Check it out now. I’ll wait.
When I realized that 3.0 meant it was photographer Ross Ching’s third effort, I wasted no time tracking down the original Eclectic and Eclectic 2.0. I then downloaded the highest quality available for each video and watched them again, in order. It was interesting to me to see how Ross’s style and technique changed. Eclectic was pretty basic and mostly local. Eclectic 2.0 added panning and more exotic locations. Eclectic 3.0 added tilt-shift to many scenes, most of which were places I go to several times a year (Monument Valley, Lake Powell, Sedona, etc.).
Ross’s work is a far cry from my primitive explorations of time-lapse photography. It’s art, photography, and real cinematography, all rolled into one. Ross’s work is probably the best examples of entertaining time-lapse photography out there. It’s a true pleasure to watch — even if you’re not a time-lapse lover like me.
And I think Ross’s work does a great job of making me understand what it is that I like about time-lapse photography. Watch any scene where the world changes around the camera. Sure, you could sit in the same spot for hours and see the same thing. But would you? Tiny minute-to-minute changes, like the shadow of a tree or canyon wall are accelerated, made more visible by the sheer speed of the action in time-lapse. All this is going on as the camera sits tirelessly, recording periodic images. But it’s only by assembling these images into a movie that we can see what the camera saw and appreciate how the little changes make big changes.
Anyway, Ross was kind enough to provide a movie called The Making of Eclectic 2.0. I downloaded and watched that, too. Twice. It gave me enough information to upgrade my pitiful time-lapse setup — junky Webcams that required a computer to trigger the snapshots — to something that could generate better quality movies.
A Pclix.
The key ingredient (for me) was a Pclix combination intervalometer and shutter triggering device. Although a bit pricey — with a Nikon D80-compatible cable and shipping, it cost me $190 — this device makes it easy to set up my camera to automatically take shots at intervals I specify. The basic programming is easy, with two dials to set the interval time. More complex programming is also possible — including setting the amount of time the camera should wait before starting or the total number of shots it should take — but a bit more complex. (I agree with what some forum commenters said about programming difficulty.) But it’s small, lightweight, and effective.
I didn’t waste any time trying it out. For this first experiment, I set the camera up on a tripod on my upstairs back patio, looking west. I wanted to capture the movement of the stars and any airplanes, as well as my neighbor’s lights going out as the night wore on. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately?), the camera battery ran out. (It was low when I started; should have charged it first.) But I don’t think it’s bad for a first effort.
The second effort focused on one of my backyard trees. I filled the feeder with food and turned on the sprinkler for a while. Then we went out. I had the Pclix set for one shot every 40 seconds and let it run for about 7 hours. This is part of the movie. I really can’t see subjecting anyone to more of the same. To say it’s boring is an understatement. It could cure insomnia. Check this tidbit for yourself and let me know if you agree.
I did another time-lapse experiment this afternoon. I put my 10.5mm fisheye lens on the camera and set it up on a tripod on a countertop in the corner of my kitchen. I set the f-stop to 22 to maximize depth of field and get most of the scene in focus. The resulting shutter speed was slow, which is great because it blurred some of the motion, giving it a more dynamic feel. I set up the Pclix for one shot every 20 seconds, then went about tidying up. You can see me, Jack the Dog (inside and out), and Alex the Bird (in his cage). I cleared most of the junk off my kitchen table and organized my camera equipment (except for the camera, which was busy) for my trip to Washington state later this month.
Tomorrow morning, I’m going to try for clouds. This morning had some excellent light clouds at dawn; if I get the same effect tomorrow, it’ll make a nice, short time-lapse.
What’s cool about all this is that every frame of these movies is a high-quality image. Yes, I do shoot at a lower resolution than normal — 2.5 megapixels (1936 x 1296) rather than 10 megapixels (3872 x 2592) — but each image is a photograph, not a frame in a video movie. So I can back out of a movie and grab a single high-quality image.
Anyway, I hope to do some better work in the future. I’ve been inspired by a master.
