Gersh Photo Post | Max Gersh | Multimedia Photojournalist

I’m pretty addicted already…AND I’VE ONLY JUST BEGUN!

I decided to try more time-lapse today. Well, tonight. I attached my camera onto my car. I hooked up hard power via a power inverter to both my camera and my laptop. There were also steel safety cables just in case something went wrong.

I wanted to shoot at two or three frames per second (fps) but my computer’s intervalometer only allowed me to shoot down to five fps.

I started in my drive way, turned out onto a main street and just drove. At one point, I decided to stop at a McDonalds. I wasn’t really hungry; I just thought it might look interesting in the final product. I then turned onto another main drag and eventually got onto the interstate (yes, I was going 60mph with my camera attached to the outside of my car).

When I got home, I was anxious to see what I got. I rendered it out as 30fps video (standard video) and since I was only able to shoot five fps, It was REALLY fast.

I then slowed the playback down to 20fps. It was still too fast. I didn’t want to slow it down too much more because it would start to look choppy. A humans persistence of vision is 16fps. In other words, if you saw a sequence of images played at 16fps, your brain would interpret it as fluid motion, however awkward the speed may appear.

To get it slow enough, I broke persistence of vision and set the playback to 12fps. It definitely looks a little choppy but it gives each image a little more time on the screen so you can see what’s going on…kind of.

There is definitely more to come. I might try one with people in a more populated setting sometime this week. Maybe even tomorrow. Anyone have any suggestions? I might try the comment left by Gavin on the last post — use a slow shutter speed to virtually eliminate people from an urban setting. I wish I had a really powerful battery backup or solar power source to take my gear into rural areas. I could also use a nice intervalometer that’s not built into a computer. Where’s my winning lotto ticket?

Yesterday, I decided to try time-lapse photography.

I tried to figure out the best place for my camera where I would have power and decided to aim it out my front window.

My camera was on a tripod with a hard line for power. It was tethered to my laptop via Firewire. My computer essentially became the dashboard for my camera. I set all of the settings on the computer screen.

After I was content with my capture settings, I went into the time-lapse (intervalometer) settings. This allows me to set the intervals between pictures and how long I wanted it to shoot. I set it to shoot one picture every 30 seconds for 1,200 frames. That’s ten hours of recording images.

So I let it run. I watched a lot of TV. Thank god there were movies on!

About eight hours into it, I decided that was probably long enough since this was just a test anyways.

So after 900 frames and some heavy compression, here is what I ended up with:

Now I have to go find more things to time-lapse! That is if I’m patient enough!