I’ve recently been working for Renault at the the largest motor show in on the planet in Frankfurt,Germany. One of the Renault press team asked me to shoot some time lapse photography of their stand. I’ve never been asked for this before so hadn’t a clue how to do it but another photographer had supplied some clips to them before so I didn’t want to admit that I didn’t know how to do it.
However Mr Google came up trumps with enough information and an online tutorial which I watched in my hotel room and experimented shooting traffic out of the window. Every camera is different when it comes to built in processes but my Canon EOS 5DSR features time lapse in one of it’s menus.Here’s a clip from my first attempt.
It allows you to set the interval and total time and even displays how long the finished animation will be. Mine was set to 1 frame every 3 seconds over 15 minutes which delivered 12 seconds of .mov file. It’s best to keep time laspe clips short as ,like any .mov file, they can get too big to be useful. The camera must be mounted on a tripod on other secure platform and on initiation automatically shoots 300 frames building the clip without the use any editing soft ware.
It seems to work best with a mix of fixed and moving subjects in the frame although you can get a motor that will pan your camera during the time lapse.
Note that during the shooting sequence there is no shutter noise but the LED menu screen will show progress and count down to completion.
It is definitely something I will add to my repertoire now that I know how to do it…all you need is plenty of time, some patience and the results speak for themselves.