Time Lapse Photography: Getting Started

I spent an evening last week out a Saguaro Lake just East of Phoenix Arizona. We had a full moon rising during sunset. This seemed like the perfect time to capture a time lapse photography session, so I planned my trip using The Photographer's Ephemeris (TPE), loaded up the camera and tripod, and headed out.

Initial Planning
There's no better way to know exactly where the sun and moon will be in relation to a specific location at a given date and time than by using The Photographer's Ephemeris (http://photoephemeris.com/)  A friend and fellow photographer turned me onto this a couple years ago.  He uses the tool mostly for landscape photography.  I generally find it useful to plan outdoor portrait sessions near sunset if I'm going to a location that I'm not familiar with.

Last week I leaned on TPE to plan my trip to the lake.  Based on the day and time that I knew I'd be there, I pin-pointed a location in the parking lot that would give me a good view of the moon rising across the lake.  I was also then armed with the exact compass bearing that the moon would rise at, taking the guess work out of setting up the camera on a tripod and waiting for the moon to "pop up."

The final prep was to know when to start recording and for how long.  I also needed to determine how many seconds should lapse between capturing each image.  The goal was to build a 30 frame-per-second slideshow "video" from those images.  

I created a spreadsheet to help me with the math.  I've made a copy of it available for free. Get your copy here.

• 90 minutes of real time sunset and moon rise
• compressed into a 36 second video 
• at 30 FPS 
• meant that I needed to capture an image once every 5 seconds

One more sanity check: 12 images per minute for 90 minutes ... 1080 images will be captured. Will my memory card hold that many RAW images?  The answer is YES if I have a large enough memory card and I choose to capture smaller RAW image than my camera's normal 21 megapixels. The final HD video clip will be 1920x1080, so the smaller RAW is fine.

At The Lake
The next step in my adventure was to simply get to the lake and begin capturing individual images with my DSLR camera, not video.  

Knowing your camera and being comfortable in manual mode is important, but not difficult.  Here's the breakdown:

• I set the white balance to "daylight" rather than AWB.  I didn't want the camera to change white balance settings throughout the sequence as it wrongfully attempted to chase the ever-changing colors during sunset.
• I set the ISO to 200 rather than automatic.  
• Manual exposure mode, I closed down the aperture to f-11, knowing that I was currently looking at a mountain that was brightly lit by the sun setting behind me.  As the sunset progressed, I knew that I'd want to open up the aperture a bit.
• With the ISO and aperture set, the camera's exposure meter was dead center when I moved the shutter speed to 1/100th of a second.  I was happy with that because I knew that I could also drop the shutter speed to let more light in as the sunset progressed.
• I relied initially on auto focus, pointing the camera at the mountain across the lake and using the center focal point only. Once the camera was good with the focus, I switched to manual focus so the lens wouldn't change focus throughout the sequence.  
• verified that I had my capture set to RAW2 for smaller images.
• Set the timer for 1 image every 5 seconds.

The only step left was to wait for 6:30 PM to come around so I could start the timer.  I planned on running until 8:00 PM, giving me a 90-minute event compressed into a 36 second video.

The Final Result

Here's a link to the tutorial I created while setting up the camera. The final result is at the end of this video tutorial. 

Enjoy.