Capturing timelpase over a longer period

Timelapse photography has its won category here in the blog and i post about capturing techniques and timelapse processing.

Introduction

Timelapse videos are a fascinating technique but they do cause some amount of effort for capturing and processing the images. In my last post i showed you how to capture timelapse images with different camera setups. And in my blog post “Timelapse processing” i showed howto to process the base images and render a video from the single images.

But until now we talk about timelapse videos for the sunset or the typical cloud moves in a landscape with capturing times of arround 1-2 hours. . But this time i wanted to do a timelapse video showing plant growth.

And with this topic a timelapse session will have other, but solvable problems 😉 But i’m just starting to get more experience.

Capturing time and intervall

First of all its pretty hard to determine the time a plant needs to grow or blossom out. This can be a couple of hours or even a couple of days. With the hyacinth flowers i tried a intervall of 2 minutes and captured a little more than 1.000 images.

This worked out pretty good. I shot the base images with my Lumix G81 and the 45mm/2.8 Macro Elmarit lens.

With a bowl containing hyacinth, tulips and amaryllis i shot with an intervall of 2 minutes again and this time it took almost 5 days. Afterwards i realized that an intervall of 4-5 minutes would have done the job. Of course you have to consider that grwoing speed is dertemined by light, temperature and some other parameters.

Shot location and lighting

Talking about a duration over many horus or even a couple of days i think you shoot at home, if you’re interested in keeping your camera  😉

In the picture above you see the shhoting situation for the hyacinth timelapse which took arround 14 hours. As a lightning i used a Godox SL60w set at 25%.  I did this with a flash light earlier but the light output of the flash even in manual mode wasn’t even enough to avoid flickering in the video.

Power supply

If you are at home power supply for the camera isn’t a problem at, because almost all system cameras offer a dummy battery or like the Luimix G9 can be operated right away from any wall plug.

Otherwise you can power the camera with the help of a power bank like described in this article.

The result

Here is the little video:

As already mentioned above i could have prolonged the intervall up to 4 or 5 minutes. And after almost 5 days there was nothing to see from the hyacinth but that’s nature. The almost 2.800 images were rendered to a video of arround 2 minutes duration. I used JPEG files in full resolution and rendered the video with Da Vinci Resolve.

Conclusion

The effort for capturing a timelapse over a longer time period is worthwhile. But you need a power supply and a constand lightning. But now after these first experiments i’m happy with the results and they were only the first step getting into it.

But those timelapse projecte make a lot of fun, even though processing takes while.

ciao tuxoche