Time-lapse failure, and what it taught me

[Jonbar18]

A few days back, I thought I'd try my hand at a time-lapse. It was a huge failure. And I mean HUGE. But of course, experience is just the name we give to our mistakes, and this was a learning experience. It helped me learn, so now I will now what to do should I ever try a time-lapse again (and I will, because its super fun!), and I thought I would share this lesson so you can skip that painful step of seeing your work and time come out as garbage.

These are the 4 most important rules i've found

1) set everything manual. EVERYTHING. The more you leave up to your camera to decide, the more can (and will) go wrong. Your camera is not very consistent, and any changes will show up in the movie. I thought I had everything covered. I was shooting in manual, so ISO, aperture, and shutter speed were set. You want yo focus manually too (check), or everytime you take a picture, it will refocus, and you WILL see the changing focus. I did all this. But I missed one thing. The whitebalance. It was left on auto, and you can see the changing colours in the video.

2) Keep lighting consistent. This doesn't always apply; say you were shooting outside, the changing light from the sun moving is wanted. But in my case, where I was shooting inside, in a controlled setting, on a subject that had nothing to do with the light, and changes in light are bad. First off, you'll want to avoid windows, and shoot only with artificial light, unless the changing light is somehow important. And don't you dare turn on light in an adjacent room!!! You also want to avoid any other sources of light, such as the tv or monitor, which emit different colours. Then there's the actual lighting. This is most important because it shows up most. You'll want to know your light source well, and makes sure it is kept as consistent as possible. In my case, I don't have a speedlight yet, so I was using a flashlight to add a little light from the side. The problem was it was one of those flashlights that run on hand-crank power. It started losing power, and about halfway had to be re-wound, so the light was stronger, than started losing power again. Sure enough, you can see this changing light

3) Know what you're shooting, and anticipate everything. I was shooting glass, a reflective surface. I was moving around a lot, and it shows. Minor things like this can be a real pain, so you have to think of everything in advance. Don't have anything moving in front of reflective surfaces, watch out for branches that could be blown into the shot by the wind, be careful with animals (or children) blocking the shot. The more you can prepare for, the better

4) Don't move the camera. You'd think this would be obvious, but hey, I still managed to hit the tripod (I'm kind of a huge klutz). In my attempt, it looks like the glass starts dancing for a bit!

So there ya go, those are the four that I had trouble with. But you won't, right?
And the great thing about time-lapses is that "rules" (like the ones above) that you need to know for them, also apply to still photography, but are more apparent in time-lapses, so it becomes easier to learn the tips that can help your photography.

If you're interested in time-lapse, you can find some more tips here

You can see the video below, SOOC...

EDIT: I'm having some trouble embedding the video from youtube, so I'll just drop a link: Time lapse

If you don't have an Intervalometer, you can always shoot by hand (use a remote!!!!), but I use the free software Camera controller. It works as an intervalometer, shutter release, and can be used for tethered shooting.

[bpretorius]

what software do you use to stitch the video together?