Time laps tips

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Mancunian Lee

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Lee
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Hi tomorrow im going to do a time laps shoot with my Nikon D60. Ill be taking pictures of an artist painting a mural, I was thinking of setting up a tripod with my camera and using a remote trigger firing a frame every 3 seconds at its lowest setting of 2.5mp because ill be making it for video.

Anyone got any tips? Is every 3 seconds sufficient time? Is there a way of automating this? What camera settings should I be looking at?

Any advice is appreciated.
 
I'd set the camera on full manual, set the aperture and focus to get what you want in focus then meter accordingly. On my 40D I can automate timelapse using the EOS utility, but I don't know about Nikons sorry.
 
Any idea how long it will take to paint the mural?

I would try and work out how long you want the video to be, and how smooth.

Say the mural takes 4 hours to paint, one frame ever 3 seconds will give you 4800 frames. If you then make each frame last 2 frames on the movie (so a 12fps-ish movie) you will end up with 400 seconds (6 and a half minutes ish). 12 frames per second might look a bit jumpy, but it depends on the effect you want. You could up it to 25fps giving you 192 seconds (3:20).......etc.

12 fps works well at showing progression imo, such as http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZnqQtzn0d8 but it can look quite jumpy like - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYKpwZzSL0E - that, where more fps would have made it smoother and possibly better looking (but a lot shorter).

Hope some of that waffling makes sense :|
 
Agree - but the use of manual exposure and focus is essential - I did one and forgot, you end up with a flashing image because the camera continually changes the settings to account for the ambient light. It looks much better and realistic if the images are allowed to darken and lighten naturally.

Not sure about the D60, but Nikon's which support it have an option in the shooting menu called "Interval Timer Shooting" which allows you to set the number and frequency of exposures, then start it off (which can be timed) and away you go...
 
OutLore said:
Agree - but the use of manual exposure and focus is essential - I did one and forgot, you end up with a flashing image because the camera continually changes the settings to account for the ambient light. It looks much better and realistic if the images are allowed to darken and lighten naturally.

Not sure about the D60, but Nikon's which support it have an option in the shooting menu called "Interval Timer Shooting" which allows you to set the number and frequency of exposures, then start it off (which can be timed) and away you go...
Click to expand...

That doesnt seem to be an option :( Didnt get chance to picture the mural but know it takes about 3 hours to paint. I want the video to be around 3 minutes and not choppy.
 
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