It is safe to assume that you might already know how to shoot a timelapse or how simply just to get better at shooting them. So here is a quick rundown on how to get those stunning time-lapses. Whether you are a beginner or a professional, tips don’t hurt.
01. Always use a tripod
I cannot stress this enough but it is very essential for one to use a good and a steady tripod. Trust me, a low-cost tripod and a windy night are possibly the best combos to ruin your efforts of getting a timelapse.
One will say, I don’t have the budget for an expensive, high-end, heavy tripod. Worry not you can make your low budget tripod heavy & steady with the help of sandbag, your camera bag or any other such items
02. Always Shoot Manual
So once your have your tripod set, mount your camera and before you compose your frame make sure all the setting on the camera is set to manual. By all the settings I mean exposure settings ( aperture, shutter, ISO ) and white balance too.
Also, make sure your lens is also on manual focus and yes and if your lens has VR or IS make sure you switch that off, you won’t need them if you have managed to get your tripod sturdy enough. You should switch off VR or IS is because if VR or IS is on, your lens will try to stabilize the image because we are asking it to do so, so the sharpness of the images might be affected, chances are slight shake will creep in.
So let’s first try and understand why not auto exposure. chances are when you are shooting time-lapse on auto mode there will be slight differences in the ambient lighting and your camera will compensate for that and will keep changing exposure all the time, and then when you compile your timelapse, you will notice a lot of flickering and you will have to go through one more process to remove flickr and chances are you might not be able to fix it or even if you are able to fix it, you end up wasting a lot of time in post-processing. So shoot on manual exposure to avoid flickering.
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Shooting during the day or just during the night with the same exposure works best unless there’s a significant change of ambient light. Whereas shooting day to night or vice versa is a whole different story, for which you will require a special device to help you change exposure for a smooth transition. One can manually change exposure too but I won’t recommend doing that. And last but not the least you don’t want your lens to keep hunting for focus all the time and keep shifting focus in the middle of amazing timelapse So switch to manual focus.
03. Shoot RAW (Whenever Possible)
Timelapses or not, always shoot RAW whenever or possible. Trust me the larger file size is always worth the data and image quality that you get. You want to process your own photographs and not let the camera apply its own post-processing algorithms and convert it into a JPEG.
Believe it or not, all the time lapses you see here on this page are shot on Nikon D300, which is an 8-9-year-old camera. My point here is simple, even if your camera is a decade old and you are shooting RAW, you will get a brilliant image out of it.
04. Always Carry Extra Batteries
Please accept this, we all have been there. We Insert the battery and realise that the battery is at 10% it’s gonna die and it only gets worse when you realise you are not carrying a single extra battery. Not just that, time-lapses consume a lot of charge because your camera is always on. While shooting a 10-sec time-lapse you will need to click a minimum of 250 pics ( at 25 fps ) so you will definitely need extra batteries.
Generally DSLRs batteries will last for 1000 frames and if you are using a mirrorless camera your battery will last for 250 – 300 frames. So when I shoot with my DSLR I carry 3-4 batteries and when I am shooting with any mirrorless camera I will carry a minimum of 6 batteries.
This will also apply for other time-lapse equipment like intervalometer, motion slider, pan head etc. Trust me again, the extra weight helps you in getting that stunning timelapse.
05. Calculate
This is very important before you set up or think about starting out with a timelapse. Before calculating you need to ask yourself certain questions like
- How long you want your final time-lapse video to last?
This will help you decide how many frames you need to shoot. - How long the event/ change is happening in the surroundings that you are planning to capture.
So let’s assume the event is happening over a period of 10 mins and you want your final video to playback at 25fps and finally, you want your video to last for 10 seconds. To figure all this we need to do simple math.
First let us decide how many frames you need to shoot for your time lapse to last for 10 secs at 25fps
25 fps X 10 secs = 250 frames
Now you need to know at what interval you need to shoot as the event is going to last for 10 mins
First will convert minutes in seconds
10 mins X 60 sec = 600 secs
600 secs / 250 frames = 2.4 secs
So you need to shoot at an interval of 2.4 seconds and minimum of 250 frames for your time lapse to last for 10 secs. If you need further clarifications regarding this, feel free to drop in a comment and I will sort it out for you.
So now that you have a steady tripod, camera mounted, frame composed, exposure setting set to manual, lens set to manual focus, battery 100%, Josh 200%, image quality is set to raw and you have done your math, well what are you waiting for? Go ahead Hit that Shutter
And get yourself a beautiful time lapse 🙂
Oh if you have some time-lapses to share! Do post a link in the comment section below. We will feature them!
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