Best Driving Time Lapse Video @gotskills23

gotskills23 CAMERA AND SETTINGS USED:
Canon 5D MkII Digital SLR w/ Canon 24-70mm f/2.8L Lens
Shot manual focus and exposure @ 24mm, f/11, 0.6 Sec, ISO 100, 1 shot every 1 second

POST-PROCESSING:
Playback @ 15fps
Post in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 or 3 (can't remember which) w/ gradient tool and crushing of highlights, lightening of darks and a bit of saturation reduction and tonal warming.
sequencing in Adobe AfterEffects

CAMERA MOUNTING:
I mounted a tripod in the (empty) front passenger seat of my Jetta with two legs spread into the corners of the area below the seat where feet would normally be and then put the third into the crack beneath the back and bottom cushions of the seat. I then extended the legs and wound the seat-belt around the legs in some clever configuration trying to reduce the amount of play as much as possible.

BLUR EFFECT:
The blur effect is due to the shutter angle, that is the proportion of time the shutter remains open to the time between the start of each exposure. This is usually expressed in degrees with 360 degrees being a 1:1 proportion, 180 being a 1:2 etc. Many times time lapses are shot with whatever shutter speed seems easiest to use and this is usually a very short one during daylight so a video like this would look much different with much less fluid motion. This was possible because of the use of a neutral density filter which is a dark piece of glass that reduces the light reaching the camera without effecting image quality or changing color balance.

SHUTTER LAG:
As to how I shot this at 0.6 second exposures every second without shutter lag: one thing to keep in mind when shooting a JPEG mode for time lapses is that the camera's internal processor bottlenecks your capture rate even though the resulting smaller image can be written faster to the card. This is because while the RAW image may be much larger in size than the JPEG most CF cards can assimilate that data faster than the cameras processing unit could compress it. Under normal (not time lapse) circumstances this bottleneck is mitigated by the internal buffer in the camera which stores the RAW data of each successive image while the processor races to keep up and it does so while you are not shooting. However with continuous shooting like this the buffer fills up and the capture rate drops and worse becomes erratic. I shot in the smallest RAW setting which gave me the greater editability of RAW as well as faster frame rate.

updated 15 years ago

Best Driving Time Lapse Video

gotskills23 2010-10-29 | CAMERA AND SETTINGS USED:
Canon 5D MkII Digital SLR w/ Canon 24-70mm f/2.8L Lens
Shot manual focus and exposure @ 24mm, f/11, 0.6 Sec, ISO 100, 1 shot every 1 second

POST-PROCESSING:
Playback @ 15fps
Post in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 or 3 (can't remember which) w/ gradient tool and crushing of highlights, lightening of darks and a bit of saturation reduction and tonal warming.
sequencing in Adobe AfterEffects

CAMERA MOUNTING:
I mounted a tripod in the (empty) front passenger seat of my Jetta with two legs spread into the corners of the area below the seat where feet would normally be and then put the third into the crack beneath the back and bottom cushions of the seat. I then extended the legs and wound the seat-belt around the legs in some clever configuration trying to reduce the amount of play as much as possible.

BLUR EFFECT:
The blur effect is due to the shutter angle, that is the proportion of time the shutter remains open to the time between the start of each exposure. This is usually expressed in degrees with 360 degrees being a 1:1 proportion, 180 being a 1:2 etc. Many times time lapses are shot with whatever shutter speed seems easiest to use and this is usually a very short one during daylight so a video like this would look much different with much less fluid motion. This was possible because of the use of a neutral density filter which is a dark piece of glass that reduces the light reaching the camera without effecting image quality or changing color balance.

SHUTTER LAG:
As to how I shot this at 0.6 second exposures every second without shutter lag: one thing to keep in mind when shooting a JPEG mode for time lapses is that the camera's internal processor bottlenecks your capture rate even though the resulting smaller image can be written faster to the card. This is because while the RAW image may be much larger in size than the JPEG most CF cards can assimilate that data faster than the cameras processing unit could compress it. Under normal (not time lapse) circumstances this bottleneck is mitigated by the internal buffer in the camera which stores the RAW data of each successive image while the processor races to keep up and it does so while you are not shooting. However with continuous shooting like this the buffer fills up and the capture rate drops and worse becomes erratic. I shot in the smallest RAW setting which gave me the greater editability of RAW as well as faster frame rate.

Aurora Borealis Time Lapse from Skibo Lookout, Minnesota

gotskills23 2017-05-29 | CAMERA AND SETTINGS USED:
Canon 5D MkII Digital SLR w/ Canon EF 15mm f/2.8 Fisheye Lens. Shot with manual focus and exposure @ f/2.8, 0.8 Sec, ISO 6400, 1 shot every 2 seconds.

POST-PROCESSING:
Playback @ 24fps

Post in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom CC 2015.10:
WB: 3500K, Tint: 0
Some tonal adjustments, noise reduction, chromatic aberration reduction and vignetting reduction applied.

Sequenced in Adobe AfterEffects:
Gentle upward panning and 'CC Wide Time' effect applied. This effect essentially combines frames before/after the current frame together. This effect was chosen for its ability to reduce noise (noise differs from frame to frame so averaging frames together smooths it out) and because it toned-down the rapid flashing that was otherwise apparent.

MISC:
Aurora was a Kp 7 (See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-index for an explanation of Kp index)
Location: Skibo Lookout 47°25'56.7"N 92°00'57.5"W (47.432408, -92.015981)
Date/Time: 2017-05-28 00:29 UTC-05:00 (CDT)

SNAFUs:
Originally I meant to shoot 1 shot every second however I had enabled 'Long exposure noise reduction' which captures a dark frame of equal length to the original shot and uses it to remove hot-spots. Therefore every other shot was missed.

Beetle Rock Sunset - Sequoia National Park

gotskills23 2011-08-05 | ...

Milky Way - Sequoia National Park

gotskills23 2011-08-05 | ...

Sunset

gotskills23 2011-03-28 | ...

Timelapse - Laguna Beach Sunset

gotskills23 2010-06-02 | ...

Timelapse - Los Angeles

gotskills23 2010-02-22 | Location: Los Angeles shot from Griffith Park Observatory
Camera: Canon 5D (Mark I) 12.8MP Body
Lens: Canon EF 24-70mm f2.8L USM
Trigger: Canon Timer Remote Controller TC-80N3

No. of Exposures: 128 Exposures
Exposure Interval: 1 Exposure every 8 Sec
Focal Length: 38mm
Aperture: f/5.6
Shutter Speed: 6 Sec
ISO: 100

Other Notes: Shot in RAW, converted to full sized jpegs through lightroom, sequenced and animated in After Effects.

In retrospect I should have shot more frequently, about every 2 seconds, as it is i had to stretch the playback rate which accounts for some of the jitter in the clouds, as the computer tried to fill in the missing frames. In future I will shoot no less than 450 frames in every timelapse, that gives me a solid 15 seconds of 30fps playback, 900 frames would be better.

Timelapse

gotskills23 2009-10-21 | Camera: Canon 5D (Mark I) 12.8MP Body
Lens: Canon EF 24-70mm f2.8L USM
Trigger: Canon Timer Remote Controller TC-80N3

No. of Exposures: 236 Exposures
Exposure Interval: 1 Exposure every 8 Sec
Focal Length: 70mm
Aperture: f/8.0
Shutter Speed: 1/200th Sec
ISO: 50

Other Notes: Shot in RAW, converted to full sized jpegs through lightroom, sequenced and animated in After Effects.

In retrospect I should have shot this for longer, used ISO 100 (50 is just under-developing the image 1 stop, so some of the highlight detail is lost), used a 9 stop ND filter (although I don't own one yet) and shot about every 3 seconds for 2.5 seconds each exposure (which would have made everything even smoother). I might have also used a longer lens.