Time lapse photography

I have my first two experimental Time lapse videos on Vimeo too...

My intervalometer would cost about 10 aus$... :grin:

However, I am hooked and have been researching the net for 'Intervalometer'. There are plenty of plans out there - I wanted a simple one to use as a startup/experiment. After creating 3 t/l videos, I am looking to getting a programmable unit.

I have found a couple on eBay that look OK
This one at £30
or
This one at £38

Both are far less expensive than the branded one... I bought a non branded wireless release for £18... Saved quids... It works just as well.

But my home built cheapo produced these. (The second one has a different sound track and has additional footage...)

Winter fuel - cutting the logs on Vimeo

Logging & Cleaning up - Time lapse sequence on Vimeo

Edit
Tech: one frame every 3.5 seconds, play back at 30 frames per second. About 4,000 individial photos with the Canon 20D DSLR

Done_Fishin said:

So you were experimenting :lol:


Photo's of the project are now obligatory .. you have the technology!!! :laugh:

Click to expand...

Not photos as such - I used my scanner to quickly get these images...

I just happened to have 3 Radio Spares breadboard pcbs that made life a lot easier...

I did say it was a web!


The front panel. I need to find a nice neat knob for the timing selector...


The innards of the thing...


There are 12 resistors, daisy chained on the back of the 12 way rotary switch.

The two 'tinned' tracks on the bottom left of the 'vero' board is where the transistor out to the camera will be connected when I get a small connector socket on the front panel...

I have devised a method of mounting the PCBs with very little hassle. I use double sided carpet tape stuck to a small piece of dense sponge. I stick that to the PCB then place another piece of carpet tape onto the other side of the sponge and stick the assembly into the box. Carpet tape does not dry out like cellotape and stays stuck for many a year:grin:

That is brilliant ZCM. I love it...Dont hide your talent matey - what else have you tucked away in the loft? :grin:

From my researches into time lapse with a DSLR, I have discovered a few tips...I am not sure if your Olympus has the feature of reducing the frame size (My Canons can) but if it can, then reduce to as small as it can.

Because the maximum video on Vimeo and Facebook playback is the equivalent to HDTV 1080p (1440 1080p pixels), most DSLRs produce images way in excess of this. Again, the standard playback is 640x480. Therefore, taking time lapse stills, you can use the smallest image size the camera can take as long as the image size from the camera is equal greater than the size to be played back.

If you can reduce the image size in the Olympus, that should reduce the stresses on the camera's memory buffer and be less susceptible to pauses while storing stuff. I set my 20D to 5Mp & on the highest compression and it still came out far greater image quality than HDTV

I am running Premiere Pro and have an account with Adobe. I have recently queried on the Premiere forum about the best way of importing stills as a sequence. I should imagine that the same will apply to Premiere Elements too. They advise that although Premiere will reduce the images to the display size, it is best that if the still images are reduced to the finished display size before importing them. By doing so, the exporting rendering will be much quicker.

My first attempt, I got Premiere to do the resizing and it took a long time to produce the final .MP4 file. When I reduced the same sequence to the 720p standard first, the outputting was much quicker.

I used Photoshop's batch process to reduce all the images and while it was doing so, I had set up a PS Action to do a wee bit of smart sharpening too.)

Also, you can increase the ISO rating to well beyond the normal. It doesn't matter if digital noise creeps into the individual images because it doesn't show when played back as a video. This opens up the opportunity to shoot stills in much darker situations than you can normally. ( Night time lapse in town, Stars rushing across the sky, Moon rises & setting etc.)

I want to devise a way of mounting the camera on the car dash. I am planning a very long drive soon - From home to southern Brittany in France. I thought a time lapse sequence of that would be a good experiment. Good job I have plenty of CF gards (3 x 16Gb & 1 x 32Gb - remember the 5D2 @t 21.5 Mp on RAW produces 25 Mb files :grin

What I need to get to grips with is the audio aspect of Premiere and video transitions and importing single stills and outputting to dvd and ....and... and...etc et al!:grin:

In Premiere Elements (and I would presume in Pro too - have it at work but not at home where I am atm) you go to Get Media or File>Import and when the browse window opens click on the first image of your sequence and then tick the little tick box that says something like "as numbered stills" and it imports the sequence as a clip to the media box - great because you don't then have them as individual stills that take ages to manipulate one by one. :grin: The software gives the clip a time based on I'm not quite sure what fps (couldn't be bothered to do the maths - I do it by eye) but this can be altered by time-stretching. This is how the beach one was done.
As far as the editing with effects, transitions, sounds etc goes - time and play is the best teacher I have found - I had to learn to do it for work and just kept trying different things - Even Elements has so many things to investigate that it could keep me busy for another lifetime :grin:
Yes - it is a good idea to reduce the pixel size of the images either in-camera or post - Irfanview (link in my sig) is a much faster batch processor than Photoshop - also very handy for renaming/numbering sequences that you may have taken one or two out of for some reason - this allows them to come in again as one sequence not many. I posted some instructions on here to someone recently on using irfanview - I'll see if I can find it.