PHOTOGRAPHY
Create videos from time-lapse photos
Time-lapse videos
Some things move so slowly, we barely see their progress, but all that changes with time-lapse photography. Mike Bedford shows you how.
We’ve all seen flowers that close up at night and open again in the morning – it’s called W nyctinasty, apparently – but only those people with more than the usual amount of patience will have seen them actually unfurling. And that’s just a start. Many other things move so slowly that we normally don’t see their motion in action. Of course, most of us have seen the world’s slowest things sped up on TV documentaries, so we know it’s possible to create super-speed movies
Making these isn’t difficult, so let’s give it a try. There are two main steps: taking the photographs, then creating the video. Free open source software is available for both tasks, and here we provide some guidance on how to use these tools to visualise the ultra-slow movement of plants, the tide coming in or going out, clouds moving across the sky, and more.
OUR EXPERT
Mike Bedford has been perfecting the art of time-lapse photography for years (although it seems like mere minutes).
Take periodic photos
The first job is to take a series of photos at regular intervals and, whatever method you use, you have to make some preliminary decisions. First you need to decide on the time between exposures. This depends to a significant extent on your subject, and specifically how slow the scene changes, and hence how much faster you want your movie to be compared to real life. And second, you need to decide on how many photos to take, and this depends on the length of the final movie, bearing in mind that you need at least 24 images per second, although you might choose a different frame rate for the eventual video.
QUICK TIP
Some cameras and phones can create timelapse movies internally, but experts in time-lapse photography frown on this, and suggest you should never use the feature. Less controversially, some cameras, while not creating the movie, have a built-in intervalometer.
There are several ways of shooting your images but, whichever method you use, you have to mount your camera on a tripod, so the photo is framed exactly the same for every exposure. The first method couldn’t be simpler. Either attach a remote release cable to your camera or use a remote control to prevent the camera moving when you take a shot, and trigger each exposure yourself. If you’re shooting the scene every second, you end up with enough photos for a 30-second movie in about a quarter of an hour, so that’s just about doable without taxing your patience too much. And, at a pinch, if you’re shooting much less frequently, perhaps every five minutes, you could use a periodic timer app on your phone to remind you each time you need to grab another image. In the main, though, manually taking every shot yourself is barely a viable solution, unless you have super-human patience.