Time Lapse Photography: First Experiments

Lately, I’ve been experimenting with time-lapse photography with my Nikon D300. So far, I’ve taken advantage of two snow events to document the accumulation of snow in the street outside my house. The December 2009 storm  wasn’t as dramatic as the blizzard on February 9-10, 2010.

Many DSLR’s have a time-lapse shooting option built in, but if yours doesn’t and you’re just itching to try your hand at it, you can  purchase an interval-timer trigger like the PClix LT. My camera the Nikon D300 takes most of the difficulty out of the equation because it includes this option in the camera's software. Simply go to Menu-Scroll down on the left side column to the Shooting Menu-Toggle to the right column-Scroll down to Interval Timer Shooting.  Remember to coordinate the time on your camera to the actual time in your location, then set up the start time and the duration of the intervals between shots and the number of shots.  Mount your camera on a tripod, point at the subject. Go have a cup of coffee, while the camera does the rest.

Also, make sure you set the camera on manual focus, aperture priority and automatic white balance. I chose manual focus because I didn’t want the camera changing its area of focus to anything that came into view and was closer to the camera. And, since I was shooting from darkness into the next day and my street is lit by street lamps, I chose the auto white balance to adjust to the different light values. Note I also added 1.3 EV to get the snow to appear white, something I failed to do on my first attempt.

There are several considerations to take into account before you set up the intervals. The first is what kind of action you are attempting to depict. How fast is it? How quickly does it change? Do you want to capture every step of the way, like a flower coming into bloom, or do you want the intervals to be further apart when you capture the action at a local parking lot like this.

If you set the times for each image exposure closer together, let say every five seconds, you get a smoother frame-to-frame progression of action. If you set the time for longer intervals between shots, then you get changes that are more dramatic in each frame, and a more herky-jerky look in the results. 

For my first attempts at time-lapse photography, I set the intervals for 20 minutes, so I could capture the accumulation of snow on the street in front of my home in Queens, NY.  I didn’t think I needed to make the interval any shorter but when I played it back in a slide show, the progression lacked smoothness and left out a lot of the street action like people walking in and out of the frame. 

I will continue to experiment and post the results while I learn to produce short “movie” versions. Stay tuned as we progress in this photographic journey.