Photography

What will you require?

1. A camera having an intervalometer* feature 2. A large capacity memory card 3. A stable tripod 4. A power adapter ( your battery may or may not last through the entire procedure) 5. A power outlet 6. An appropriate software to combine the individual frames into a movie There is no need to shoot in Raw. JPEG, medium quality, will do fine. * If your camera does not have an intervalometer (a feature that automatically takes a shot at fixed intervals), you may like to buy one. A Canon intervalometer (TC 80 N3) costs around USD 140 while a Nikon intervalometer (MC 36) costs around USD 130. Of course, in theory at least, you could manually fire the frames at the calculated interval, but you’ll start cursing me much before you complete the shots! The idea is fairly simple and doing the project is exciting. The number of frames we need to shoot and the interval between each shot has to be calculated. Here’s the deal: 1. First decide on the total time that you want to compress. This is known as the Event Time. Let’s say you want to show a flower opening up from its bud stage to the full-bloom. Let us also say that the whole process takes 3 hours. Hence 3 hours is your Event Time. 2. Now decide how long you intend the movie to be. Let us say we want the movie to be of 1 minute (60 seconds) duration.

The formula:

Take the frames per second rate for the movie ( generally 25 fps) and multiply it by the total movie time in seconds. (works on Windows platform too) are two such software that I know of. Upload the images to a folder on your computer and open Quick Time Pro. Go to File > Open Image Sequence and select the first frame from the folder and click OK. You will be asked as to how many frames per second you want the final movie to have. Once you feed in this information (25 fps is fine), the software will do its work and complete the movie. Once the movie is ready, you may import it to Windows Movie Maker or Adobe Premier or Apple’s iMovie and add titles and music to your liking. The movie clip “Monsoon Moods of Mumbai” (check out www. smartphotography.in/tutorials/specialfeatures/1772-monsoon-moods-ofmumbai-timelapse) comes from Smart Photography reader Anurag Prashar of Mumbai. Using the intervalometer feature of his tripod mounted Nikon D800 camera, Anurag shot about 720 frames over a time frame of 2 hours, with a 10 second interval between shots. The D800 automatically joins the frames to provide the movie clip, hence additional software is not needed. Then, using Nikon ViewNX 2, Anurag added the wind noise which he obtained through a freely available sound clip on the Internet.

Rohinton Mehta