How do you take time-lapse photography

Time lapse photography can show pictures that we can't see at ordinary times with its unique perspective. Therefore, time lapse photography has always played a certain role in photography. The so-called time lapse photography is actually composed of independent individual photos. By controlling the interval time of each photo, the purpose of compressing time is achieved. The effect of time lapse photography is the effect of video fast forward playing through the camera. Today, let's talk about some basic knowledge about time-lapse photography,

The necessary equipment for shooting time delay includes a camera, a tripod (with a pan tilt that can be turned in all directions) and a shutter line with timing function.

Time delay photography is very important to the control of shooting duration, which directly affects the effect to be displayed. The minimum measurement unit of video duration is frame. The playback speed of movies and TV is 1 second = 24 frames, that is, the playback duration is 10 seconds. We need to take 24 photos every second to get smooth and normal playback. Then it takes 10 seconds * 24 = 240 photos

How to show the content for a longer time in 10 seconds through delay shooting? Take 10 minutes as an example. First, convert 10 minutes into seconds: 10 * 60 seconds = 600 seconds, and then 600 seconds / 240 sheets = 2.5 seconds. In this way, take a photo every 2.5 seconds, at least 240 photos, and you can show 10 minutes of spatial changes in 10 seconds.

The scene of time-lapse photography should choose the scene and object of "change, movement and dynamic" combination of dynamic and static. If the shooting scene does not have dynamics and changes, the shot time-lapse photography is meaningless.

Since the time-lapse photography is a long-time spatial change, the setting of shooting parameters is mainly to keep the style of shooting pictures consistent. Therefore, the shooting mode is manual mode (m). The time-lapse photography shoots large scenes. It is required that the captured pictures should be as clear as possible. Therefore, it is necessary to select the small aperture of f8-f16 to shoot pictures with large depth of field

Let's talk about the shutter setting. Generally, the shutter speed of video shooting is set at 1 / 50s. This shutter speed is close to the observation habit of human eyes. Selecting a shutter speed faster than 1 / 50s for shooting delay will cause the moving objects in the picture to be too clear and cause a strange visual feeling.

Time lapse photography uses a tripod to shoot stably, so there is no problem of safe shutter. You can use a slow shutter to highlight the feeling of flow, especially in the night when shooting the streets with heavy traffic. However, when shooting in an environment with sufficient light during the day, it is necessary to install nd filters to avoid overexposure of the picture.

In order to ensure the image quality, ISO should be kept as low as possible. When shooting at night, it is better to install a light shield on the lens, so as to avoid the excessive stray light entering the camera due to the slow shutter speed, which will lead to the blurring of some part of the captured image.

Fixed white balance color temperature (automatic white balance cannot be selected). Because the delay shooting usually takes a long time and the light changes greatly, especially in the day to night delay shooting, try to keep the light and dark colors of the captured pictures as consistent as possible.

Select Manual Focus shooting to prevent the camera from focusing continuously due to the change of the environment during shooting. Resulting in shooting failure.

Finally, let's talk about the choice of picture formats for time-lapse shooting. There are ARW format and JPEJ format. The advantages of raw format are that the range of picture adjustment in the later stage is relatively large, and the image quality is slightly high. The disadvantages are that it occupies more memory and cannot be directly output. The characteristics of JPEJ format pictures are just opposite to raw format. It can be straight out, and the adjustment range is small in the later stage.

You can choose the picture format according to the actual shooting needs. That's all for the basic knowledge of time-lapse photography. If you don't understand it, you can leave us a message or watch our follow-up video tutorial on time-lapse photography.