More time lapse or should I say fashion lapse.Today's volunteer Lucy fully entered into the spirit of standing still in the cold Folkestone weather. I remember reading an article by a landscape photographer who said that if the conditions are not perfect it is not worth getting your camera out of the bag. I understand what he means but for me I need to experiment in different conditions. Folkestone presented us with a lovely morning with a bit of cloud movement - it would of obviously been better with a more dramatic sky but some things are just out of my control.
I used an old 28mm manual lens with a four stop ND filter to enable me to get to a nicely exposed image at around 1/30th second.The manual lens helps to avoid flicker which can be introduced by slight aperture variances in auto lenses. I used a Nikon D7100 crop camera and used the small jpg images to create the time lapse. Triggertrap as always was my triggering device of choice, it's interface makes it easy to use on location, the elapsed time feature is also a big help.. One thing that was very different in today's set up was that I used a little bit of flash fill on three of the clips using a battery powered studio light. It is expecting a lot of any strobe unit to keep up with a flash every few seconds and if I attempt this again I will pick a day when the ambient light is much lower.
I have stitched together four clips into one short video. All of the clips were taken over a ten minute period. The first interval was set at ten seconds which worked nicely but was just too slow when using a model, there was also not really enough cloud movement. All of the other clips were ten minutes at three second intervals which produces quite a pleasing look. My favourite clip is the last one with the Memorial Arch in the background. I will definitely do this again but use a wider lens.
I created the video file using Picasa which provides a really simple way of quickly compiling time lapse and is a free piece of software which is a bonus. I know that I should really add a backing tack to these clips but they are very much just work in progress.
The next stage of this concept is to get the model moving but to appear in real time. I am trying to work out a way of doing this but working out the timing is proving very difficult.
