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…

Jun 01, 2009 by habi Trackback
Tags: chives, nikon d80, time-lapse
Filed in: technospeak
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