Well as you are probably aware, I am having an absolute ball with this time lapse photography. The more I get into it of course the more gear I want, I was going to say "need" but that would be untrue.
I have been using the 'Nero trigger' which I bought a few years ago for about $300.00 if memory serves. I must say that I am very impressed with the time lapse feature, not having used the other features yet I cannot give an opinion on them, however a great bit of kit for any photog. It weighs only a few grams and is not much bigger than an LCD screen.
Before I go on I had better clarify something right off the bat... I am not sponsored by anyone for anything and the opinions I give are my own from my experience as a result of my choices just as any choice you make is your choice and we are each responsible for our own research and consequences.
Anyway back into it.... the last couple of blogs were about some of my silly mistakes and I shared the result of those so that you could see how much time could be lost. You need to be very mindful of the number of shots you are going to need because time lapse photography is a very time consuming exercise. I'm going to share my rule of thumb - 10seconds per hour. Shooting at 1 image per 10 second interval will give you 6 images a minute or 360 images an hour. Now if you are in Australia you would be using the PAL system where the best compression is H.264 to produce MP4 quality video and unless you are shooting strictly for TV you would most likely want to use the standard HD 1080p 25fps which equates to 14 seconds of video footage. To put this in perspective, the average working week is 38 hours (I think) but it would take me 42.85 hours to produce 10 minutes of video and that does not include post processing.
As you can see little errors can become costly blunders in the blink of an eye but it's all good as I'm making those mistakes for both of us and as long as you follow my blog I will steer you clear of the gopher holes I step in. When you get it right and you finish putting together even a few minutes of video footage, with sound effects and music score, the sense of self satisfaction is absolutely huge. For me the most important thing is satisfying my biggest critic and my biggest client - Me! If others like my stuff, even better but the bottom line is, if I'm not satisfied - no one else will ever see it.
Last week I said that I would post some 'good' work (I would be grateful for your opinion), but I'll only include a link here as the quality of the video's within these blogs, leave a lot to be desired as do you tube and other online services, only because the internet needs huge bandwidth for quality, a costly commodity.
Vimeo Link: https://vimeo.com/104994721
Youtube Link: http://youtu.be/Tlfo-EvPeR0
I'm quite pleased with the end result, of course there were a number of issues during the shooting that I'll be improving on but at this point in time ... what do you think?
Now I've have just started to photograph the magic hour (that hour after sunset) when ramping is required for the transition from day to night. For this I'm using a little app on my Galaxy S III called 'Triggertrap' which has a "Bramping" (Bulb Ramping) feature. I've only used it once so far and for light trails but Oh-la-la the result is beautiful :) More of that next time.
Till next time, take care and stay safe.
PS. Please do comment below, the feedback (good or bad) is ever so encouraging.
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