A timelapse film I created in 2008, Dawn and Dusk in Mini San Francisco was posted to
laughingsquid. At the invitation of George Lever it’s been added to the Citypulse collection, where exibited at Citypulse at the tower in Santiago, Chile.
Recipe
Equipment
- Canon EOS 450D (Rebel XSi)
- USB cable to connect 450D to laptop
- Netbook (Aspire One) running Mandriva 2009 (any laptop will suffice)
- gphoto 2.4.3 installed on laptop
- tripod (sturdier the better)
- Photoshop (or gimp)
- Quicktime (or mencoder)
Technique
- You’ll need to pick a subject – get as high up as you can. I’ve found that people don’t work all that well in time-lapse videos, but traffic and slow moving things (especially boats, clouds) are awesome
- Set up the camera on the tripod; use spot metering and aperture priority to reduce flicker, and turn auto-focus off
- Connect the laptop to the camera, and use this command line for gphoto: gphoto2 –set-config capture=on –capture-image-and-download -I 5
- You could probably also use the bundled Canon software, but I’ve never tried it
- I capture an image every 4-5 seconds, but you can crank this up or down depending on what you’re capturing
- You’ll end up with a long sequence of images
- These can either be fed directly into Quicktime to make a movie, or you can run them through gimp or photoshop first to tweak/post-process them
