These are some basic guidelines and tips for shooting timelapses on your digital SLR camera. I happen to use the Canon 350D (Rebel XT) camera, so I will use that as the basis for these tips. Specific information about how to make other cameras (Nikons, etc) work is not something I know about. But hopefully the general information contained here will help.


• Equipment you need.



A Digital SLR camera (shown with vertical battery grip). Probably an entry-level "crop" sensor camera is best for beginners.

Lens. Preferably one that is wide-angle and easy to set to infinity. I use the Canon 10-22mm, and love it. But even a kit lens can get great results.



Intervalometer. This is the small unit that controls your camera during timelapse. Without it, most cameras cannot shoot timelapse at all. On Ebay just search for "remote timer _____" with the blank spot being your type of camera -- Canon 5D, Nikon D3, etc. On Ebay you can get a knockoff the Canon TC80-N3 for about 1/3 the price that Canon charges. I can personally recommend LinkDelight's Aputure brand of remote timers (intervalomters). I use one and it seems to work great.



Tripod. The taller, heavier, and sturdier the better. You don't need an expensive, light carbon-fiber tripod... they will result in shaky timelapses. If you need to use a light tripod, make sure to weigh it down with some bricks or rocks or those sandbags sold in camera stores. Also, having a tall tripod works out well, because you get a higher vantage point for your wide shots, plus you don't have to crouch down and hunch over to see through your viewfinder or mess with the LCD menu. A tripod that can raise at least as high as your chest is ideal. I use the Slik Pro 700DX.

Battery grip. Extra batteries. AC adapter. Inverter for your car. The first thing to get is a vertical battery grip extender. Timelapses, especially at night, drain batteries like crazy. But with the grip, you can shoot twice as long. If you plan to shoot in remote locations, you might want to get an inverter in your car's cigarette lighter. You can pick these up at Radio Shack, and they plug into your cigarette lighter. 125-watt is more than enough. You can use the inverter to charge your camera batteries, laptop, cell phone, ipod, flashlights, etc, while you are out in the field. You can also power your camera with an AC adapter that plugs right into your battery grip. I actually own 3 or 4 inverters, and I use them bigtime when shooting and camping.


• How to shoot.

Now that you have your equipment ready, it's time to shoot. Start off with something simple, maybe a scene in your neighborhood or at a park during the day. Set up your tripod, find your frame, then bust out your intervalometer and secure it to your tripod (I use a velcro strap to keep my TC80 from flapping in the wind).

This is where you have to start being careful and double checking stuff, or mistakes will happen.

Load 2 fresh batteries into the battery grip. Are they fully charged? Double check.

Once you have your subject and frame chosen, bring up your menu.

Format your CF card. If you are shooting RAW, you will need a 2GB card for roughly a 10-second timelapse (240 frames). My 4GB cards usually give me about 460 frames, which is just short of a 20-second timelapse (assuming 24 frames per second playback). If you are shooting JPEG, you might be able to get up 1000 images on a 4GB card. Maybe more. An 8GB card can handle roughly 700-900 RAW frames, more than enough for nearly any shoot. Of course, your camera's resolution will factor in.

Once your CF card is formatted, make sure your white balance is set to a custom level. Never, ever use Auto White Balance, or the camera will change color temps in the middle of your sequence, which completely destroys your timelapse.

Now, double check to make sure your lens is set to manual and the shot is in focus. If you leave the lens on autofocus, every bird or cloud that flies by will cause your lens to seek focus again, totally ruining your timelapse. Haha, I had nice shots destroyed this way... twice!

Okay, your batteries are fully charged, your CF card is blank and ready to go, your white balance is NOT set to auto, and your lens is focused and set to MANUAL. Fire off a couple test shots to make sure the exposure and framing are good on your LCD.

Now it's time to set your intervalometer. The TC80 and most similar devices have several modes, including interval, bulb duration, number of exposures, and a delayed start. The most important is interval. If you are shooting clouds in the daylight, you probably want to have your shutter fire about once every 1 to 3 seconds (shooting RAW, you might have to stick with 2-3 seconds, as many DSLRs have trouble shooting RAW at 1fps or faster). These short interval times will give a smooth motion to the clouds. For faster-moving clouds, set 1-second intervals. Slow-moving clouds, try 3 seconds between frames. You don't want to set a really high interval time, like 10 or 20 seconds, or your timelapse will look very "choppy," stuttered, and sped up. Trial and error will lead you to know which interval is right for different types of shots. A movie/timelapse clip usually runs at 24 frames per second (24p), so a good rule of thumb is that 240 photos will produce a 10-second timelapse when you stream them together in Final Cut, Premiere Pro, or whatever video editing system (NLE) you use. At 30fps, 300 shots are needed for 10 seconds of video.

Now check your shot one last time. Do you have manual exposure settings (shutter speed, f/stop, white balance, etc) and a good interval time (usually between 2 and 6 seconds)? Check your lens for dust one last time (one speck of dust can ruin a whole timelapse because they cannot easily be "painted out" across 200-300 frames), then take a deep breath and press START on the intervalometer! At this point, your camera will begin firing off shot after shot - "click-clack! click-clack!" - and you are on your way to making your first timelapse! At this point, I usually kick back (with a beer if I'm in a remote spot) and hope for the best.

Things get trickier if you are trying to shoot a sunset or any scene where the light conditions change rapidly during the sequence. I'll make a special post about that later.

Great write up with lots of valuable information. You have answered so many questions for me.

Will you do a write up on a nighttime timelapse?

can that TC80 be modified to work with an olympus e-500? are there other similar products like it?

how did you pull off such smooth pans by the way?

A perfect explanation of Canon shooting - Great effort Tom!!. I completely concur with everything!! the gems:


I feel neurotic at times!! I need to develop a field checklist...


so true.


again so true. In a few rare cases I've found that aperture priority will work but your tempting the dread flicker that no post will save...

I have no idea in practice, but.... all it does is send a pulse down the wire, nothing strange, the TC80 does all the rest of the work. If it's the same kind of pulse that the camera expects to get, then it should work...... if you can get one to try out then it should be safe to experiment..... all low voltage stuff.

One thing for the guide Tom....

If you can, then setting the exposure time to be 50% of the frame interval will give you the "natural" 180 degree shutter look for motion blur. That may well need ND filters for a lot of setups.

For my post work stuff then shooting continuous 360 degree shutters gives you more options, but it depends a bit on what you intend to do with the footage as to whether it is worth it.....

thanks so much colin, ill pick on up and give it a shot!

I used to do the "pans" with AE, but now Adobe Premiere Pro CS3 seems to do a great job with "panning" across larger frames just using the simple scale and position functions in the default "effects" window. Probably best to use high-quality PSD files in your timeline instead of jpegs or whatever.

In theory you could do "pans" straight off of your RAW files in AE, which might turn out to be the highest quality possible. Long render times, though.

Additions to Tom's rock steady start-up tutorial.....

Take Spielberg's advice to an aspring director: "Wear comfortable shoes."

It also helps to develop low grade psychic abilty so you can see what's going to happen 42 mins. after you hit the 'go' button.

Two more details that might save you from a lot of grief:

1) Cover your viewfinder. Entering stray light may cause inconsistent metering and be a source of flicker.

2) Check the metering. If you also use your camera for still photography you are likely to switch to spot metering which could ruin your time lapse. Evaluative metering using the whole frame is usually the way to go.

One more tip:

Arrive early and do a short test time lapse, to make sure that your camera's software/memory/buffer can keep up with your imaging.

ie: If you're shooting a series of 2-second night-time exposures, and your camera is set to record at the highest possibly quality (or even set to record in RAW), then your camera gear may not be able to record as fast as your [intrav.... interv... instraval...] Automatic Programmable Shutter Release Cable is set. If this happens, then your shutter will not get released until your camera/memory/buffer is ready.

It happened to me while working on a fireworks display recently...

Otherwise, great write-up, Tom. Thanks.

Oh, that reminds me of one more piece of advice: If you are shooting in the field, prepare everything you possibly can for your timelapse setup in advance so that setting it up on location will be as fast and easy as possible. You may find yourself highly stressed by intense heat, blistering cold, mosquitoes, your lady waiting for you impatiently, your own impatience or you may be in a hurry to get it running before the show begins. It only takes one little error during setup to waste all your effort, so the simpler you make it for yourself the better.

And check and double check that you have everything you need before you leave. Realizing halfway during the setup that some cable is missing may lead to profuse cursing and loss of self-respect

Timelapse Gear:

http://draygo.blogspot.com/2008/07/timelapse-gear.html

Barely a tutorial though.

Customizing Your Camera.

http://draygo.blogspot.com/2008/07/customizing-your-camera.html

These are mostly not new ideas, but they are to those just starting out.

Tom,
Nice tutorial.

How are you pulling off such fast 1-3 sec intervals with a Canon Rebel? I suspect you're using low to medium resolution image quality settings to keep your buffer from filling...

I can shoot 2s intervals RAW, but for 1fps, I use JPEG.

Interestingly, I was shooting with a friend this week who has a 400D. We both had similar shots set up, both using 2s intervals. A few shots into the timelapse, he noticed that his 400D could not write to the card fast enough for 2s. My guess was that the 400D had similar inner-workings to a 350D, but simply had more resolution, making it harder to write quickly to a CF card. I have no idea if that is why, though. It's just a random guess.

Hi there,

Thank you very much for this wonderful forum/post/tutorial with all the information Ive been looking for on the net for months and months!
I'll introduce myself in a few minutes in the introduction forum but first I have a small newbe-question; I have a D200 with a CF Extreme III 4Gb and I noticed that if I just shoot in 1 second exposure -bursts at night, the buffer gets filled up after about 100 photos (small JPEG).
Will I have this same problem when I use the MC-36 remote? In other words; when using this remote will it fill up my buffer, preventing me from shooting more then 100 photos, or will it write the files constantly to the CF card so the buffer will never be filled?

I want to fix my camera in my car and start shooting while driving at night. And since I was thinking about taking 1 second shots as fast as possible I figure 100 shots wont do me good.

Anyway, hope I posted this in the right thread. If not dont be angry at me! Im just a newbe!

Thanks,
Christiaan

I would test this in the comfort of your home before hitting the road. I hate to have part of a sequence shooting at the desired frequency and then a later part at a mixed interval (e.g. 1st half 1pic/8sec for 100 frames then errors causing a 1 out of 3 to shoot at 1/16sec. I'm using a remote controller so it basically keeps doing a countdown regardless of whether the camera fires or not. If it doesn't fire when intended it restarts the countdown and typically fires the next try.

I'll be interested to see what other people say but I am not sure how an external source will solve your problem. I beleive the buffer speed relates to conversions and storage. The processors can only do this at a certain speed. You'll just be storing to a remote location instead of to a flashcard. Now if another card, etc. can help you store the data faster then it might work. Again, I would put the camera on a tripod and have it shoot 100+ pics in your living room. You can then look at the counts per unit time or the time stamps (preferences) of the pictures/files to see if you have errors.

My camera actually shoots RAW files faster then large JPGs because of the added compression step (I beleive). I wonder if you can set your camera to take low resolution Raw files if that would help.

I'd love to see a discussion somewhere of perhaps the most important issue: metering/exposure mode. Seems to most difficult decision to make for those, like me, who lack experience (and crystal ball reading skills).

Manual or automatic (Tv,Av), and how/criteria to decide? A cloudless sky - manual. An approaching thunderstorm - automatic. Any words from the wise?

My first timelapse - being in a puritanical mood I chose to use Manual mode - a mistake. Had to manually change exposure several times to keep up with the light levels.

For now, which way to go about it (manual or automatic exposure) depends on the situation and personal taste. I almost always use my cameras in automatic mode, hoping most if not all of the resulting flicker can be eliminated in post. For those cases where it can't I know it will be possible in a not too distant future. I can see three possible solutions to the problems with automatic exposure settings:

1) Better deflicker software. Current deflicker solutions only analyze the image data and for some reason cannot handle some exposure jumps. In some cases fiddling around with settings will solve the problems, other times it appears to be plain impossible. Something that might help significantly is pre-filtering an image sequence based on EXIF data, smoothing out jumps in exposure which will ease the job for the image analysis based deflickers. It is not a perfect solution that will work 100% in all cases, but at least for my own footage I know that it would make a big improvement (having eliminated flicker by manually smoothing out exposure steps which is a pain!).

2) Hardware hacks. Shutterdrone has been working on a setup with a remote cable release hooked up to a light meter. It complicates the setup some and isn't foolproof either, but surely a solution that the DIY people can appreciate (and from what I've seen, you belong to that category ). Thread is here.

3) Improved cameras. Time lapse photography is a growing field, and one day manufacturers may actually start taking us into account (such as by implementing in-camera interval timers without #@!!! 99 or 999 shot limits - how hard can it be to give us an extra digit or two?!?). On shorter term the hope is that the move to video capable DSLRs may lead to elimination of the coarse exposure steps; the implementations seen so far do not help but are also in dire need of improvement.

I did a run at # 1, trying to write a script to smooth out exposure steps. Unfortunately, the one method I could find for exposure adjustment was way poor (multiplying the image data by a factor). It *could* be done via a Photoshop script which gives access to much better methods for exposure adjustments. Unfortunately I have no experience with Photoshop scripts and don't have the time to investigate it currently. But perhaps it is a function we will see in future versions of Photoshop or other software for that matter.