Time-Lapse Photography, Part I

I've been intrigued with doing time-lapse photography for a couple of months now. I always thought I would have to wait until I got a DSLR, because of the limitations presented by my camera not supporting any type of intervals or cable release. About a week ago, I did a little math in my head and figured out that with some patience, I could get moderately long time-lapses by hand. So I tried one. I took about a picture a second (shooting at 640x480 resolution, and only my second-best quality). It worked, but even with my tripod as stable as possible and my button-pushing at its most careful, it looked like the person holding the camera was on meth when the video was played.

Luckily, I discovered that one picture per second creates more frames than I really want to use, which in turn creates a somewhat slow and boring time-lapse.

Here is attempt two:




See on Flickr


This was a good exercise. I was just shooting from outside my school, near the parking lot. There was a lot of obstruction, so my composition is iffy. Also, I was trying to shoot the sunrise, but there were clouds in the way. On the bright side, using a two-second timer on my camera eliminates the minute differences in angle between frames; stabilizing the video. And I think I got a lot closer to the framerate I want.