Time lapse photography

Ever since “taking up photography as a hobby”, I’ve been interested in time lapse photography. As you probably already know, the idea is to take a picture every few seconds and glue them together to make a video.

Today, I decided to try it out with my new DSLR, the Canon EOS 450D… nothing special:

Here’s more on how I made this video. My plan from the beginning was to recreate another “melting ice” video I made with a Canon Point and Shoot camera last year. More on that later.

In any case, I obviously needed something to remote control the camera. I initially planned to use the EOS Utility, but after it refused to run on the laptop I was using, I downloaded a trial version of DSLR Remote Pro.

(Why can’t intervalometer functionality be built in to the camera…?)

I set up the scene and set the program to take a picture every 15 seconds – I think I should have taken one at least every 10 seconds, but it did the job fairly well. The camera was set to take the lowest quality pictures (which still reached a resolution of 2256×1504).

I copied the pictures to my computer and used some program to crop the pictures to 1920×1080 (1080p, full HD). I don’t remember what, exactly. This is what the pictures looked like then:

A bit boring...

Doesn’t look too fancy, does it? That’s when I realized I could use Adobe Photoshop Lightroom to adjust their colors & much more.

In short, Lightroom is designed for post-production work. Color adjustment and much more for photographers. I use it to manage my photography and for post-production work.

I loaded every photo into Lightroom and applied this preset to every single photo (not by hand, obviously!)

This was perfect. The preset is designed to highlight the red colour:

Much better, isn't it?

In fact, the photos got a complete makeover.

After this, I used VirtualDub to make an AVI video off the photos. I loaded it to Premiere, added some titles and fancy Creative Commons music.

And we’re done. Oh, and here’s that old video:

(snorrrt)

Hey! Thanks for reading this blog post by me. But before you go, please consider leaving me a comment if you thought the post was useful to you. Thanks!