Time-lapse with DSLR Camera

I do have an old EOS 20D DSLR camera, which was used already when I bought it. The camera has been used for occasional photographing, but I thought to test something I haven’t tested earlier. Nature documents do have nice time-lapses of flowers growing, and since we are after all arcticraft I decided to photograph snow melting. Since I am not even amateur photographer, I will tell the story about how my time-lapse photographing come along and what kind of problems I faced.

In the mid winter of 2010, I decided to purchase a remote controller for my EOS 20D, because I wanted some nightly shots from neighborhood. After studying different possibilities, I noticed that remotes are so expensive that I wouldn’t ever get one. TC80N3 did have all those fancy features I really needed (in my dreams), but it’s price was 200€. By huge accident I bumped to some forum topic telling about cheap remote controller for EOS DSLRs at DealExtreme. After reading comments about this specific remote, I decided to order it even there were shortcomings in it.

After few days of waiting, I got notice from post that I was having a package waiting for fetch. With extra enthusiasm I ripped the letter open and found the remote shiny and working. At the very same night I dressed my jump suit and walked out to -28C / -18.4F. This copy TC80N3 worked somehow at quite cold weather, but not that well. It started to reset itself if it was touched or moved. Indeed, I managed to get some nightly photos, but I certainly wasn’t satisfied for the quality. After few cold trips and tens of nightly photos, I decided to drop the idea and use the new nice remote for something else. (If I ever manage to take proper night shot with digital camera, I will write about it here, but 20D simply couldn’t provide quality good enough that I would continue my night photographing. If I’ll take photos at night I will propably use my old 35mm SLR EOS 5 or purchase truck ran over EOS 5D Mark II body for cheap price)

 

After couple of months when there was still too much snow, but already few warm rocks sitting in the garden, I found out that snow melting is after all quite an interesting event. I retrieved my camera and not so much used remote and started to photograph my first time-lapse snow melting. The first sequence was using 10sec interval which was totally too long and the final time-lapse was only a few seconds long. The second test used 2sec interval and at that point my EOS settings were set for JPG+RAW, which made the 2sec interval too fast for the camera and it started to drop frames. Surely I could have removed the RAW option to make the camera faster, but since I am not photographer, I am stupid and I totally missed that option, I only was able to curse how slow my camera was. After changing the interval to 3sec everything started to look good (at least I thought so). At this point I was only looking for stills and I wasn’t even thought how to compile all these photos to time-lapse.

After looking for different ways of combining the stills together I found several different ways of doing it. Ffmpeg can encode single pictures into movie file with ffpeg -f image2 -i IMG_%04d.JPG test.mpg syntax, but in my case it wasn’t working since the first frame wasn’t 0001, but 0728 instead. So, either not using ffmpeg or using shell scripting to change the numbering of the file and then using ffmpeg. Another way was using mencoder, which was used in munzli’s blog, but I didn’t have mencoder installed at that time so I thought other possibilities. After pondering a while, I found myself using Blender3D for making the movie. Blender is able to import set of single stills and play them as a movie and render them to whatever ffmpeg is capable of. Short tutorial here shows how to use Blender3D to do the trick.

After a short rendering phase, I finally had my first time-lapse video of snow melting. But what did I saw, the video was jumpy just like I would be changing the position of the camera constantly. Bugger, the camera was auto focusing for each frame and it made the camera move  a bit but still so much that it was annoying. Also the 3sec interval was a bit too long time, so next time-lapse video should be shot with 2sec without RAW option enabled (yes, at this point I had figured out that disabling RAW option makes the camera faster). Also a friend of mine, who has been photographing quite a bit more than I have, proposed that I should keep shutter speed and the aperture same during the whole time-lapse shooting to keep the lighting as same as possible between frames.

I started to shoot last time the final time-lapse, but of course the battery run out just before water was fully dried out. So I had to start recharging the battery and before it was done the sun was set. Next morning it was raining and last snow drifts were melting too fast. After mid day the sun was shining like there weren’t ever been raining and all my nicely decorated rocks were totally dry. I once more read through the list of must to remember to do before shooting the time-lapse and started the final shoot. The shoot was success, the time-lapse video was looking nice (from technical point of view) and I was finally happy. Here is webm version of the final video with some small encoding flaws but still looking pretty for that size, since the original was 3GB.

So, what did I learn about time-lapse photograhping

• Tripod is stabile enough
• Camera battery must be full since there will be lots of frames photographed
• RAW option must be disabled or otherwise camera buffer will run out
• Switch to manual focus after focusing the area well
• Figure out current shutter speed for selected aperture, and I will keep these settings during the whole time-lapse shooting.  (In my case I used aperture 14 to get better depth of field. Smaller aperture better depth of field)
• Time interval is set to 2sec in remote

This time-lapse video study was probably one of the most easiest one because the total photographing time was 30 minutes and the Sun didn’t move too much at that time. If I would be photographing flower growing, it would take extremely long time, a static place for the whole equipment setup and lots of post processing of the images to match the lighting, since the weather is changing quite a lot where I do live. But maybe I can try something more complex some day.

If I would have read about time-lapse photographing from internet, I think I would have avoided all the problems I faced during the making process, but then there probably wouldn’t be that long story to write and also it would probably be easy, who knows. At least I did have nice time studying my camera, remote controller and quite a bit of myself as well.