Time-lapse & The Making Of
March 6th, 2009
I have made another animation today, of clouds over Leiden. Over the Sweelincklaan, to be exact.
For this time-lapse animation, I hooked up my camera to my computer. The Canon EOS utility has a timer tool that allows you to take interval exposures. I set the timer tool to take pictures with a 12 second interval, for 240 exposures in total. That evens out to 48 minutes. I experimented with a shorter interval, but the clouds—at that moment—were going by very slowly and I decided to capture a longer period with longer intervals. Unfortunately, 3 exposures failed (reason unknown) and they show up as little jumps in the animation.
The tripod I used is my recently purchased Vanguard Sherpa 750R, mounted with my Canon EOS 400D, and using the EOS utility 2.5.1.1 for its timer control. I shot in raw mode, converted the images to 50% size and JPEG format afterwards using the Canon Digital Photo Professional program, sized those down to 500×333 with a little extra sharpening in Irfanview, and used these as input for my MakeAnimatedGIF program.
In the rest of this story you will find the animation (it is 20MB, so be cautioned) and some pictures of the equipment. If you just want to download the animation, here is the link. Right-click it and choose “save target as…”.
The animation
To start, here is the animation. It will take a few minutes to load completely and animate at its designated frame rate of 30 fps, but the result is very nice. You can download it if you want for better viewing, just right-click it and off you go. Enjoy the other pictures in the meantime!
Pictures of the equipment
The way my camera is hooked up to my laptop. You can see I am photographing through my window, and if you look closely at the animation you can see some reflections of the tripod and the wall behind it.
The view from behind my camera.
The Timer control on my laptop, counting the shots.
My name is Marco Hokke. My blog is about the things that interest me and things I might forget if I would not blog them.
One Response to “Time-lapse & The Making Of”
1wu xiaojing
May 3rd, 2009 @ 1:53 pm
it is very nice of you to let people download it as they like.
i like this gif cloud picture very much. i’ll show it to my students.
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