Time-Lapse

Time-lapse is a great invention and camera technique in which the camera is set to take a frame through a period of time and at preset second, minute, or hour intervals. After the allotted time has finished the image sequence is played back and the result is movement of the environment over time. What I mean by this is if you place the camera up at the sky and photograph for a whole day then you will see that the clouds, sun, birds, light, stars, moon, and world are all constantly moving. You can do the same with a plant throughout the day where the plant is actually moving with the movement of the sun to get its best direct contact with the suns life giving rays.

One of the best things about this camera technique is that most smart phones have it built into the camera function. All you have to do is place your camera in a position or on a stand where it won’t be bothered for a length of time and then make the proper settings and let the camera shoot the time-lapse. A good start for time-lapse is between 5 seconds and 10 seconds. Some extreme time-lapses are ones that take a frame once a day at a specific time. You see some fun examples of this where mothers and fathers take a single photo every day of the pregnancy of the mother. You can literally see the baby grow to term.

Something you should decide if you have the ability to do so with your camera is to figure out what the best frame rate is that the time-lapse plays back at. Hopefully you have this functionality on your phone camera. If not don’t worry because the stop motion app and all the stop motion softwares that you can get for free or buy have this function. All you need to do is set up your camera and set the shooting time trigger. Then once you are done you can change the frame rate and see the various speeds that the frame rate effects the playback.

TIME-LAPSE ASSIGNMENT!!!

Please be aware that to advance to the next module you will need to complete the Time-lapse assignment. What this means is that you need to have created an online streaming account on YouTube or Vimeo. Then you will need to pick a subject matter to film using the time-lapse method. This can be a street, a yard, a flower, a room, the sky… etc… Then you will upload your time-lapse to your streaming account and submit the link via the assignment module within this Lessons Module. Don’t worry you won’t be graded on this but you will not be able to advance to the next module until you have done this.