timelapse-movie with a nikon d80

lately, there has been quite a hype around timelapse-movies (one fabulous example by the amazing keith loutit: Metal Heart ), so i wanted to jump the bandwagon: as there is no addon firmware for my camera as there is for certain canon models i’m confined either using an intervalometer or an external software to trigger the time-lapse process. luckily for me there exists an donation-ware called sofortbild.app which allows for tethered shooting with os x.

sofortbild.app enables you to remotely control your cameras setting like exposure and aperture, perform bracketing and inteval-timed shots. and it looks quite gorgeous:

so, to generate a time-lapse movie you need:

• a subject, which either moves quickly or very slow (my little “garden” being a very good example)
• a nikon DSLR, sofortbild.app and a mac or some other way of getting a lot of shots out of your camera
• some way of generating a movie, either with quicktime pro, imovie or the free and platform-independent imageJ
• a bit of time (starting it in the morning and then going for a dive in the thunersee is perfect for this :) )

i’ve set up sofortbild.app to take a picture of my garden with an interval of 1 minute and let it run from 10:49 until 16:21, giving me 333 images (i’m a sucker for nice numbers…), imported the images in quicktime pro with a rate of 10 pictures per second resulting in the short movie below

i’m amazed on how much my chives move during approximately 6 hours, even inside the room (which was necessary, since we’ve got scaffolding around our house which is being renovated). oh and yes, they look bad, but it’s because they have to live inside for the moment…