Time Lapse Test Movie

Well I landed up spending most of my day off in bed. Such a lazy sod I am ;-)

 

Nah, I seemed to have picked up some bug, (that's what I get for working with members of the public!), and it appears to have gestated enough now to want to escape from my body using whatever exit is possible.

Oh yes, all of them! (I shall leave out the gory details!)

 

I hate being ill because I still want to get on with things despite my bodies objections and the demands from my wife Teresa to get back into bed. So I quickly sneaked out this afternoon to have a stab at some time lapse with this old Fuji of mine, a minutes walk up the lane, fifteen minutes of shooting and an extremely brisk walk back clenching a certain part of my anatomy which hindered the walk! Made it just in time.........

 

Anyway, enough of the gross stuff, here was the basic process.

 

Camera in manual mode, check, white balance not on auto, check, exposure set for sky and ground, check, sturdy tripod, check. So I wrapped a velcro strap around the camera and an old shirt button on the shutter to fire off the camera remembering to turn the LCD off to preserve battery life.

All was going well for a few minutes when a walker appeared with a very large Labrador that couldn't resist seeing what I was up to and bounded over knocking the tripod as it got to me. Damn, no point stopping now this is a test after all. Fuss of the Labrador whilst keeping it away from the camera, quick chat with the walker and I sat back down next to the clicking camera. Wasn't too long before my body launched a nuclear strike and I had to rush home very quickly(!)

 

Well, now what am I supposed to do with these 1000 odd frames? According to most of the web resources, (and I use that last word loosely!), you simply buy software. I don't think so thank you very much, this is supposed to be a bit of fun after all and I'll decide later if I'd want to be pursuing it further and possibly buy something! Luckily I came across MakeAVI and it does the job, especially for free. But then I had to find out about video codecs and how some people want to charge you for these things too(!) Again a quick scour of the old 'tinternet' came up with the goods with Xvid and away we went. Now I had a massive video file, (100's of Mb's worth!), and slowly loaded it into Virtual Dub and started trying to figure out what I could do. Apparently a lot as it seems, filters for levels, brightness, contrast, (which helped with the cloud/ground poor exposure), smoothing, (for getting rid of the flicker typical of a time lapse), as well as a host of other things. I probably spent more time finding out what all these things were than using them!!

 

But I got there......sort of. Things still flicker and a check of the still images showed birds of all kind flitting in and out of frame, a kestrel for a moment, a massive dragonfly, butterflies, typically all the things that you try hard to photograph without success and here they are all over the damn place without even trying!

 

Still, a lot learned and best of all I totally enjoyed it :-)

 

Things to do include modifying the old Fuji to have a 2.5mm jack to accept an electronic release, (a quick poke around it's insides reveals just enough space between the power and usb socket - nice). I also realised my 'dolly' isn't going to be of much use for wide angled landscape time lapses, (doh!), so I might build a pan head as well. Especially as I have some more stepper motors and a spy of that old video recorder I pulled to bits has a nice big rotary bearing in the form of the VHS tape head :-)

 

Right, got to dash, natures calls. Again!

 

Done