A series of time lapse clips recorded at the 2010 North Carolina State Fair. I've been really wanting to edit a series of clips into a short, themed movie for a while now. This year I went out to the fair with the idea of recording time lapse video of the nightly fireworks display. I had arrived about 45 minutes early and decided to wander around the fairgrounds for a while to find the best place from which to record the fireworks. While I was walking around, I realized that the wave swing could make a really cool time lapse so I set up and recorded a couple of rides worth of images. I set my camera to record at 3MP so I was able to "preview" the time lapse just by holding down the "next" button in the image review mode and having the pictures cycle rapidly. Pleased with the results I continued walking around recording rides until the fireworks started right behind one of the rides I was recording! I ended up coming back three more nights to get more clips of rides and fireworks.

One thing that I notice, which is a technical limitation, is the lag between pictures. This isn't noticeable for slow moving things like clouds, but for fast things that I'm wanting to make faster it can be very jumpy. This is mainly an issue with the close-up of the fireworks at the end of the video. Sometimes a mortar would explode between shots, resulting in a full star-burst appearing suddenly in one frame and then disappearing totally in the next as it faded between frames. How noticeable this will be is a function of the lag between pictures and the shutter speed you are using. For clouds, I usually use a 4 second shutter speed, making the relatively small 1/3 second lag go unnoticed. For the fireworks I was using a 1/3 second shutter speed, meaning that I really only recorded half of what went on when you take the lag into account. Nicer cameras can snap shots more rapidly and in the case of this video it may have been better to record the fireworks as video and then blend frames to speed up the action.