This one is a really weird video that loses a lot in the compression that it endures at youtube. While I was waiting for the previous time lapse video to finish, I noticed some gnats buzzing around under the streetlights nearby. The light from above illuminated their bodies and gave the illusion of trails following tracing their flight path.

This is one video where you really notice the limitations of using a low end dslr for time lapse. The gap between exposures dictated by the limit on continuous shooting frame rate for the rebel XS means that a lot of the motion of the gnats was lost between exposures. This makes their paths look discontinuous. For something like cars driving down a street this isn't so bad because the path that the cars are taking is predictable and your brain will fill in the gaps. For these gnats, the path is random and the result looks like a bunch of squiggly lines.

I decided to have a little courage and go out and set my camera up in plain sight for a video. This shouldn't take courage but in today's security conscious climate everything looks like a threat and I definitely got some suspicious and evaluative stares as I had my camera mounted on a guard rail in the mall parking garage over one of the entrances.

If you time your video right around sunset, you'll see an amazing change in the luminance of the sky in a very short period of time (less than 20 minutes). In a scene like this where the lighting comes from cars' headlights, you don't have to worry about the sky getting darker. I'm going to have to start bringing a book to read when I do this though. Even though this video only took 20 minutes versus the 2 hours I spent shooting each sunrise in Arches NP it is much less interesting watching cars zip in and out of a parking garage.

This was a quick video I made of the moon rising behind my house. I liked the way that the moonlight was reflecting on the pine needles that were partially obscuring the moon. Because the moon is so bright, a very fast shutter speed is required to preserve the details of its surface craters. This means that trying to take a picture of the moon with something recognizable in the foreground (like a city skyline) is usually impossible without allowing the moon's highlights to become completely blown out. In this case, the dancing pine needles were the focus and it was OK that the moon just looked like a white orb. Unfortunately the compression inflicted by youtube ruins the only interesting thing about this video, as you can barely see the pine needles.

So I got home early from work one day and some great clouds were blowing over my house. I thought about setting my camera up outside to make a video of the passing clouds but the wind was blowing much to hard and I knew my little tripod wouldn't be able to hold the camera steady enough, not to mention the risk of rain. It might be a good idea to spend some time building a box to shield my camera from wind and water. It definitely would have helped here and allowed me to get a better angle for the shot that didn't include bits of my house in the foreground.

As you can see, I ended up setting the tripod up inside my house instead. There's even some noticeable spots on the video as bugs landed on the window outside during shooting. The video was made over a three hour span with a frame rate of one shot every four seconds. This resulted in over 2000 frames when I was forced to stop when my memory card filled up. I typically set my camera to take 3mp pictures for these videos because 3mp would allow me to build the resulting video in 1080p if I desired to do so.

I'm happy with the frame rate that I chose for the video as I think that it makes the clouds move fast enough to be interesting but not so fast that the viewer can't watch the individual clouds change and warp as they pass overhead. One thing I would like to try is using a slower shutter speed to blur the movement of the trees blowing in the wind. As it is now, they appear to vibrate as time passes. If a slower shutter speed was used, this vibration might not be as noticeable while making the trees slightly blurred. If you want to try shooting time lapse during the day, it is would be wise to invest in a set of neutral density filters for your lens which will darken the image coming into your camera and give you more options for using slower shutter speeds.

After the interesting results of the daytime driving time lapse I was anxious to try the same thing at night. For night driving, the choice of shutter speed has more consequences for the look of your video. A long exposure (slow shutter speed) will create light trails and give that laser-y look to the passing cars and street lights while a short exposure will give results similar to the daytime driving time lapse. Because the street lights and headlights are really the focus of this video, I chose to use a long exposure with a frame rate of 1 every 2.5 seconds.

The mistake that I made was in choosing a framerate that was slower than my shutter speed. During the time between exposures, my car obviously continued to move. This results in gaps in the light streams passing by my car in the video. The better choice would have been to set my shutter speed to 2.5 seconds to ensure the appropriate frame rate and then set my camera to continuous shooting and set the cable release to hold. Depending on how quickly your camera can shoot continuous photos at the current resolution you can all but eliminate the gaps between frames that are noticeable in this video.

Also, if you're wondering what happened during that white out portion at the middle of the video; I thought it would be cool to drive through the mall parking deck on the way home while shooting this video. Obviously the shutter speed I was using was way too long for the bright environment in the parking garage. If you are taking a video like this and move from dark to light or light to dark PULL OVER and change your shutter speed, don't try to do it while you're driving! It may seem like you're interrupting the flow of the video but when you put the video together it won't be that noticeable that you pulled over while shooting and if it is, you can always cut out the offending frames.

Here is another example of the usefulness of a arm-style camera mount over a tripod. For this video I clamped the camera mount to the metal rod protruding from the bottom of the passenger seat head rest I also could have clamped it to the handle for the parking brake. Both of these mounting locations are firmly fixed to the car and help minimize the vibration of the camera while shooting.

The choice of frame rate is very open here because while the scenery will be moving outside your car the cars in front of you will be relatively stationary in the frame as you drive down the highway. Because of this, the choice of frame rate really depends on how fast you want to car to appear to be moving and what speed you will play the resulting movie at.

When I started driving I was facing west and the sun was setting so I chose a shutter speed on the camera that would avoid a totally blown out sky. However, as my drive continued I began heading north and the pictures begin to get darker. It wouldn't have been safe to adjust the exposure while driving (obviously). I think that it is a good idea to take a test photo in all directions (N, E, S, W) and choose some average value to avoid severely under or overexposed pictures if you will be changing direction while shooting.

This is a video that I made while working on a part for my masters project at NCSU. The camera framerate was 1 frame every 3 seconds played back at 12 frames per second. I've found that the most useful setup for time lapse makes use of the "magic arm" produced by manfrotto. The manfrotto arm can be clamped to any solid object (preferably something heavy or bolted down) making it much more reliable when you need to be sure that the camera does not move. It also makes is much easier to move the camera around to get the angle you want. In this case I clamped the camera to a bar on the side of the drill press and on the back of the lathe for the second half of the video.

Luckily there was a plastic shield available that could be set up in front of the camera. I also used a clear filter over the lens just to be sure that no chips bounced over the shield and hit the lens glass.

I think that I higher camera frame rate would have helped when making this video. To be sure that the camera caught everything I was doing, I often had to hold a position and wait for the camera to take a picture. This highlights the challenge of choosing a suitable framerate for recording an event in time lapse. Something like machining a part may take a long time but is composed of a large number of steps that are completed relatively quickly. Using too large a gap between frames may result in the viewer missing steps and making the video hard to follow.