Over the holidays we were given the challenge to take 1000 photos- it didn't matter how we took them or what they were of just as long as we had 1000.
As I had been playing around with the idea of a time lapse for quite some time this project encouraged me to actually carry it out.
First I had to decide what I would monitor, I wanted something that didn't move so fast that I would miss out on significant motion during intervals but also something that wasn't so slow that I wouldn't be able to capture any movement at all. I also wanted the object I was photographing to be in an environment in which I could walk away and leave my camera running without worrying about it being tipped over or the image becoming over or under exposed due to the change in lighting. After sorting through my ideas I decided on a basic time lapse of a clock.
As my camera didn't have the option for an In-camera intervalometer and I didn't own a physical one I decide to install Magic Lantern (A third party firmware) on to my SD card. Not only did this add an array of new options and enhancements to my camera but it also allowed me to use my camera as if the software wasn't installed if i didn't require the additional options and gave me full control over my time lapse settings. In order to take 1000 photos I set up the software to take a photo every 7 seconds until it reached this amount.
The display showed that it would take just under 2 hours to take all the photos and would playback for 40 seconds at a frame rate of 25fps
As I had been playing around with the idea of a time lapse for quite some time this project encouraged me to actually carry it out.
First I had to decide what I would monitor, I wanted something that didn't move so fast that I would miss out on significant motion during intervals but also something that wasn't so slow that I wouldn't be able to capture any movement at all. I also wanted the object I was photographing to be in an environment in which I could walk away and leave my camera running without worrying about it being tipped over or the image becoming over or under exposed due to the change in lighting. After sorting through my ideas I decided on a basic time lapse of a clock.
As my camera didn't have the option for an In-camera intervalometer and I didn't own a physical one I decide to install Magic Lantern (A third party firmware) on to my SD card. Not only did this add an array of new options and enhancements to my camera but it also allowed me to use my camera as if the software wasn't installed if i didn't require the additional options and gave me full control over my time lapse settings. In order to take 1000 photos I set up the software to take a photo every 7 seconds until it reached this amount.
The display showed that it would take just under 2 hours to take all the photos and would playback for 40 seconds at a frame rate of 25fps
I used Photoshop to edit my photos together as this was a software I already had. I loaded up the photos as an Image sequence which brought up the animation panel I set it to 24fps as I wanted the video to be slightly longer. I shrunk my images to 2000px and added adjustment layers to the video group until it looked the way I wanted, I then cropped the image to a 16:9 ratio and shrunk the image again to 1920 x 1080px and began to render the video.
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I had problems at this stage as I first rendered the video as an Image sequence which just saved all the photos again but with the added effects, the second time I successfully rendered the video but in the wrong format resulting in it playing only on certain devices and stuttering or not playing at all on others. I eventually found that this was because I didn't have a certain software installed. After solving that issue I rendered my video as an Mp4 and uploaded it. As I only shrunk the image to 1920 x 1080 it's able to play at a maximum of 1080p.
After exporting the first video I thought that it felt abit empty so decided to add music suggested by a friend and other effects such as a fade at the begin and end of the clip as well as the song. I had to resize the image again in order to pan across the image instead of to a transparency layer.
Overall I'm pleased with the images that I took and how I chose to display them although I regret constantly checking how many photos had been taken as you are able to see my shadow in some places of the clip. This project has actually encouraged me to create time lapses of other things as I now know how to, it has also taught me that the smallest thing can be really interesting depending on how you look at it.