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Time Lapse - D5000... Just Amazing

tollie

Workshop Member
As a recovering Leica shooter I have been gradually exploring some of the goodies buried in the menu's of the Nikon D5000.

I had seen somewhere a clip about how to make time lapse videos and so yesterday set out to make one.

Amazing... easy and fun... the camera and software worked seamlessly as advertised...

I set the quality to jpg basic... set the camera up on a tripod, focused and then set the focus to manual... I planed to compress one hour of time into 1- minute... so I set the Interval Timer to 10 sec for 360 intervals. Amazing... just chugged along effortlessly doing what it was told to do.

After the 360 jpgs were shot... I used the in-camera clip creator to make four clips... this I later learned was unnecessary... as I could have imported the shots directly...

I loaded the clips into iphoto and from their imported into imovie... these are Apple products... very low end but enough. I made a title and laid on a tune from my music library which imovie read. I could adjust the color and contrast in imovie as well.

I created a youtube friendly video and uploaded it to our youtube channel... wonderful and fun.

Here is a link to the clip: Lemontree Minute

Next time I'll get the horizon streight... lol.

Cheers... perhaps we could use a "Fun with time lapse" thread. Amazing... all with a low end camera.
 

tollie

Workshop Member
I have continued to work on time lapse photography... and as with all things the more you get into it the more there is to learn.

I have a new time lapse video up on youtube here.

Please take a look and you will see considerable improvement over my first effort.

First... it is possible to use light room to edit the individual images efficiently. What I did was to select the first image in the run of 540 crop, color balance gradient and so forth and then sync the adjustments to all.

Second... I shot slightly higher quality jpgs and exposed in aperture priority for 2/3 of the run rather than manual. Why because a manual setting will go to dark long before the actual scene is dark. I ran aperture priority till the exposure was about 2 sec... and then I switched to manual and let the image fade to dark.

Third... google is your friend time lapse photography yields a mass of advise and tips... also some dedicated software to balance out brightness which will flicker in aperture priority. I learned that sunset, sunrise timepapse is refered to as the holy grail of time lapse photography. In this case no flicker... at least none that bothered me... the site for the software is called LRtimelapse.com.

Finally... I output the video file using lightroom's slide show feature setting the play rate to the minimum of 1.10. This increased the playback rate from my previous 6fps to 10fps. It is possible to download for free user templates for the slideshow which will out put 24fps. This gives a very smooth playback but demands a ton of initial images.

Last of all... the video was loaded into imovie... where I added the title, a couple of fade to black transitions... downloaded for free a one-minute tune... and learned how to adjust the start of the music. All cool.

If any here have done some of this I'd love to see some of the work.

Cheers and thanks for looking.
 

tollie

Workshop Member
Over the last two nights I worked to create a star-trail video. I was having trouble mixing the long exposure (30sec) with the on-board intervalometer.

Ultimately, I concluded that there simply is an upper limit to the in camera intervalometer. This limited me to a 15 minute run which created 30 images at a go. Then the intervalometer needed to be reset. So between bouts of running back and forth every 15 minutes the vid is a bit jumpy.

The vid consists of about 200 30 second exposures... joined together and played back at 10 frames per second. Edited and created in lightroom... then laid into imovie where the title, fades and music were added.

I caught a shooting star about 2/3 of the way in. Cool. There is much more ambient light... a street light than the eye registers. For example to the eye the tree is a black silhouette... but with a 30 sec exposure it is bathed in lamp light as if I "cleverly" added some light painting.

Oh... I tried to create a star-trail picture using Enfuse... but the ambient light made the trails very faint.

Here is the link:
Lemontree Star Trails - YouTube

Cheers
 

GrahamWelland

Subscriber & Workshop Member
Todd - not the cheapest option but check out Pramote systems Pramote Control intervalometer. Simply the best IMHO. (that said I more usually use my MC-36)
 

tollie

Workshop Member
I appreciate the lead.

A quick MC-36 question.

With the on-camera intervalometer you are restricted to 999 intervals... and with 30 sec exposures this reduces the total number of exposures to 33. With the MC-36 how many exposures of 30 sec each can I make?

I also use the mirror lockup function on the D5000 (called exposure delay) this adds 1 sec I think.

Any advice is welcome.
 
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