Having been meaning to have a go at time lapse with my digital SLR for a while, I decided to give it a go and what an amazingly straightforward exercise it was.

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+ 6 hours =

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The Nikon D70 camera was connected to a PC via USB and controlled with Nikon Camera Control Pro software.

With the camera secured, pointing in the right direction over Granton Harbour in Edinburgh and focused where I wanted, the software was set to take a photo every twenty seconds at f/8 in aperture priority mode. I’d decided this was the way to go to avoid any aperture changes during the day and changing shutter was the best method to alter the exposure as the day went on. CLICK – and we’re off!

Couple of hours later – ooops – I noticed the camera had stopped clicking, quick check and the battery had died! Fire in a new one and we’re off again. I missed about 20 mins and if you watch the video closely, you can see the little jump.

1000+ photos later, it’s onto the PC!

Pics were captrued as RAW+jpeg but for putting together a video, RAWs were not really necessary and just added to the processing time.

All the pics were loaded into Adobe Lightroom and this is where something like LR really, REALLY helps – the photos came out with an aspect ratio of 3:2, I wanted 16:9 for a widescreen video. So the first pic was opened, a pleasant crop chosen and it was applied to the rest of the pics, bang, done. It really is that simple – select one pic, identify the crop you want, switch to Library module, select everything, press “Sync Settings”, choose “Aspect Ratio” and press “Synchronize”…. 1000 photos with exactly the same crop applied in about 8 seconds. Doesn’t get much better than that.

No colour adjustments were done and all the pics were then exported with dimensions of 1368 x 720 to allow the creation of an HD video without the video software having to do any resizing.

Next, it’s time to fire up JPGVideo from NDrW, possibly the simplest (but most absolutely effective) piece of software ever. Load the jpegs, set the frame rate, get an AVI video. (I do like things kept simple!) I’ve tried numerous video apps to create a video slideshow from a stack of pics but this really is the way to do it.

I could have left it at that but it’s nice to have titles and a track so off to Windows Live Movie Maker – import the video, add a few titles and credits, stick on a track from one of the best soundtracks ever made (Local Hero) and it’s done and I’m very, very pleased.

The end video plays great on a big TV or PC screen but is a bit big for web so one last step and fire it through ffmpeg to get an FLV with slightly smaller dimensions for here and here it is:

Lessons learnt to be applied next time:

  • No need to shoot RAW
  • Make sure battery is charged or use mains power
  • Pick a day when something more than clouds and tides is happening!

I will be doing another one when there is a bit more going on, the harbour is starting to fill up with the leisure craft so hopefully won’t be too long before I get round to it!