Over the course of last summer’s vacation, I’ve gotten into taking time lapse videos from still images. The result may turn out to be really rewarding, or sometimes unnerving, depending on how you’ve set up the camera, and it’s setting.

I personally do not own a fish-eye lens, which some people might feel that it’s an essential if you’re going to take time lapse shots. And while I was back home in Singapore, I did manage to borrow one while I was shooting a time lapse of the stars moving across the sky. I rotated around several venues, some turned out stunning images, and others, not so. I complied a few of my favourite time lapses into a sequences and exported it from Premiere, and this is the result.

ps. You have to watch in HD to really see the stars move.

Coming back to Melbourne, I thought I wouldn’t have the time to do such things, especially well into the night and early morning with the new semester kicking in, but I could not curb my urge to go out and shoot random stuff. On a side note, I consider myself to be quite a photography enthusiast, but no where near being a professional or aspires to be one. Moving on, in the second week of the semester, I decided to head out to the streets of Melbourne, to search and seek anything that might catch my eye or attention. I used to take long walks around the city and shoot at various things, subjects, spaces, anything that I could think of, however this time I was pretty fixed on a location, and that was Princes Bridge, linking St Kilda Road to Swanston Street going over the Yarra River. I had no intention of taking a time lapse at that very moment, as I was more interested in doing stills, and trying out a new “technique?” that I’ve just learned from the internet on making a cinemagraph.

However, while I was shooting various stills, I got the feeling it’s an opportunity that I shouldn’t miss, and given the fact that I’ve not tried shooting a time lapse in Melbourne before, and why not try it for once. And here’s the outcome.

Music used was purchased from iTunes, written by Moog of MightyCarMods.

These time lapses are just the ones that I thought are pretty decent, and I dare say that I am happy with, however there are still quite a number that I believe still needs some work to improve on, or maybe even a re-shoot (if I’m lucky). There is so much that goes into making a brilliant time lapse, and the ones that I’ve seen on YouTube or the internet makes me wonder how much does one have to invest into making just a short 30-60 seconds video. Obviously you have to invest a lot of time into it as well, while I was shooting this time lapses, I was on my phone calculating the duration my camera has to be shooting in order to achieve the desired duration of the final time lapse playing back at 24fps, also considering the amount of storage I have left in my camera’s SD card. Not to mention, the exposure, while shooting over an hour or so, the lighting of the sun is bound to change with cloud cover and the Earth’s movement and all the science behind it, it’s hard to maintain a good exposure on the camera, and I know there are methods of getting a consistent exposure by doing it in post, but overall, you would still want a decent level of raw images to work with.

A perfect example of exposure changing over time would be this week, when a group of friends and I decided to head out to Westgate Park to catch the pink lake and see what’s all the big hoo haa about. I left the camera to shoot over a shorter period of time, as compared to the other time lapses I’ve shared in this post as my friends and I were getting a little too hot from the heat and the sun, but I thought it’s a good example to show how often the light changes just over the span of 20 minutes.

Music from Free Music Archieve, under the Creative Commons.

Written and performed by Derek Clegg, Sit Stand.

http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Derek_Clegg/DC4t/Derek_Clegg_-_DC4t_-_10_Sit_Stand

These examples are just what I have been messing around with lately, it does occupy a lot of time, both during the shoot and in post. However, I am still not entirely sure if I would like to take this topic up as an investigation for my final assignment, but it’s definitely a developing idea. Moreover, I am not too sure how this would sit in the realms of filmmaking, or is it considered more towards photography?