Timelapse photography

[cutetrill]

I'm going on an Alaskan Cruise in May and I wanted to do some time lapse photography from my balcony. I have all the stuff I need for the camera side of it, but I don't have a tripod. I don't really want to lug anything big around in my luggage with me. Do you think I could get away with one of those gorillapods? I'm just worried about it not being sturdy enough to stay on for the hours that I need, and where I would be able to stick it. If all else fails I'll just end up shooting through the glass of the balcony railing. But I would prefer not to of course. If it matters I'll be on the Island Princess.

[awboater]

I have taken several time lapses, both with a Gorillapod and a Tripod.

 

The tripod I used was a Benro Travel Flat, which packs away very nicely in carry-on luggage. This is the tripod of choice for any cruises I go on. But if I don't take the tripod, I take a Gorillapod.

 

A Gorillapod may work if the camera is small enough. I don't know about the railings on the ship you are going on, but the Royal Caribbean ship I was on, I was able to fasten my Nikon P7000 around the wood railing top with a Gorilla pod for a time-lapse of re-entering NYC harbor last fall.

 

One additional thing you will want though is a safety lanyard. From the camera strap to something else on the balcony, so the Gorillapod won't fall into the sea if it falls off (or gets bumped off) the railing. Just a length of nylon rope with a clip on the end should be sufficient.

 

Since that trip though, I came up with a new idea. It is a make it yourself magnet-pod.

 

Here is what it looks like:

 

 

It consists of a 100lb pull magnet, and a short "magic arm". While I show the thing holding a DSLR, I would be a bit hesitant to do this other than a test. But other than a bit of vibration, it held the DSLR with a fairly heavy lens rigid. The total weight of the camera/lens was about 5lbs. So any compact camera with interval timer should work great with this setup. And since a cruise ship has plenty of steel, finding a place to attach the magnet should be easy.

 

I no longer have the P7000. I replaced that with a Nikon V1, and also since then have purchased a Nikon P310, both of which will do time lapse. Either of those cameras will work great with the "magnet-pod".

 

To make it, I purchased two items:

 

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000I1TFCK/ref=oh_details_o00_s00_i01?ie=UTF8&psc=1

 

This magnet has a cover so that the magnet does not attach itself to anything it should not. And I did talk to the tech department of the manufacturer, they said no ill should come from any x-ray machine. I could think of no other thing that would make the security staff upset more than burning out their x-ray machine while scanning my 100lb pull magnet in my carry-on.

 

And here is the magic arm:

 

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B008M23DW0/ref=oh_details_o00_s00_i00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

 

There is a hole in the magnet to attach the magic arm, and the magnet even includes a screw eye, and 1/4-20 nut that you need. The screw eye is not needed, but the nut is needed to attach the magic arm. Normally, the screw eye that bolts to the top of the magnet so as to facilitate a rope so you can use it to retrieve objects underwater. I just used that hole to attach the magic arm - so no drilling was even required.

 

And there is another hole in the end of the magnet that I attached the screw eye to, so I could attach a safety lanyard (but I don't think it is needed). If you do that, you will need another 1/4-20 nut.

 

Total cost was $26 and change.

 

I have not tested it yet, but I hope to use it next cruise come Sep.

 

One other consideration. When you do time lapse, often when you are in port, they bring out the maintenance crew and/or washing rigs - at least Royal Caribbean does. If you attach the Gorillapod to the balcony railing, you might get your camera wet, or knocked off from the scaffolding (or perhaps painted).

 

So the use of either a tripod or my gizmo means you can put the camera into the balcony a bit, minimizing any damage that might occur. Other issues I have run across are overheating of the camera (and shutting it down after a couple of hours) due to the bright Caribbean sun beating down on the camera. Again, a tripod or my magnet-pod will get the camera out of the sun.

 

Finally, the last issue is length of battery. My camera only lasts about 3~4 hours before the battery is exhausted. With a tripod or my magnet-pod, I can change the battery without disturbing the position of the camera. That will be hard to do with a Gorillapod.

 

And I am designing a battery power supply for my camera expressly for time lapse. The typical battery is rated around 2000mAH, and I plan on using NI-MH D cells with a 10,000mAH capacity, which should be sufficient for all-day time lapses.

 

Anyway, this is the things I have experienced with time-lapse photography from a balcony.

 

If you try something like my "magnet-arm" idea, let me know how it worked out. I won't get to try it until our next cruise in Sep.

[cutetrill]

Thank you for your help.

 

I'd seen your other posts about this camera set up before but was hesitant to try it as I'm not very handy with things like that but if all you have to do is screw it together I think I could get away with doing that. And I certainly like the price!

 

We're heading to alaska so I'm not worried about the sun beating down on anything, more like rain sprinkles to contend with instead. As for battery life, I was considering just running an extention cord out there and plugging the camera in. You think I could get away with that?

 

Also, one other question. When you do time lapses how often do you set it to take the pictures. I was thinking either 3 or 5 second intervals, leaning towards 5.

[framer]

I love gizmo posts, thanks for sharing a great idea.

 

framer

[awboater]

When you do time lapses how often do you set it to take the pictures. I was thinking either 3 or 5 second intervals, leaning towards 5.

 

Here are my thoughts.

 

First, depending on the camera, it might be limited to something longer. My two cameras that have interval capability are limited to around 30 seconds or so.

 

I am into time-lapse enough that I have custom designed an intervalometer/camera trigger (via embedded Arduino microcontroller), which will let me chose anything from one second to a few hours. My P7000 (that I no longer have) time lapse interval was limited to a minimum of 30 seconds. But one time, I "forced" the camera to shoot every 5 seconds for a time lapse with my custom intervalometer. Unfortunately, after about 20 minutes, the camera overheated and shut down. So for that camera, 30 seconds was the absolute minimum.

 

So my thoughts are the reason some cameras may be limited to a certain minimum is to prevent overheating.

 

Needless to say, you will want to experiment with a few settings and create a couple of time-lapse videos before you go on your cruise.

 

I have found that if you want to shoot fast action shots, say you are driving around the city and want to get a cool action, then 5 seconds or less is a good start. But if you are wanting to do time lapse of weather, clouds, etc. then 30 seconds or even 1 minute is fine.

 

You want to end up with a 2 to 3 minute video, which, along with your frame rate and overall time period will also dictate your interval time. There are several tradeoffs there.

 

You also need to consider what software you are going to use to assemble the photos into a video. I need to buy a better video editor, but as of now, I am using both Windows Movie Maker (PC) and iMovie (MAC). I have both, and each one is free with their respective operating systems.

 

Each editor is limited to about 8-10 frames per second, which is a bit slow. Ideally, you will want to get up to 20 frames per second or higher. Thirty might be a bit excessive though as that just requires more photos, and file sizes per second.

 

Commercial animation I think uses around 24 fps or so, and I think in the old days, they used to use each drawing for two frames (for a total of 12 drawings per second). I guess they got tired of making all of those drawings.

 

Believe me, I am far from an expert in this - I have just done a bit of experimentation, and considering I have limitations in both camera interval and processing software frame rates, I may not have quite hit the sweet-spot for frame rates and intervals.

 

Also, I usually turn the resolution and size down as much as I can, as you don't need 600 14 megapixel photos. Fact is, you really don't need as much resolution and quality in video as you do for still photos, and the file sizes will be a lot easier to work with if you use a lower resolution.

 

Here is a time-lapse I did with a frame rate of about 10 fps using Windows Movie Maker and my camera's minimum interval of 30 seconds. It is a bit jittery, and it misses a bit of detail. Adjusting the frame rate and interval perhaps would make an improvement.

 

 

By the way, the low quality of this video was the result of my reducing the video quality for youtube so I could upload it with my slow DSL connection. The original video, even with the lowest resolution in my camera is quite good.

 

I used a gorillapod on the railing, and I had to cut the video short. We were just backing into the pier when the cleaning crew stared washing the exterior of the ship and were spraying water everywhere. This is what lead me to the magnet-pod idea.

 

I am certainly no expert at this. My knowledge has come from amateur trial and error.

 

Time-lapse is a fun thing to do. I just bought a product called "CamaLapse" which is a little gizmo that rotates once per hour to give some movement to time lapses. Unfortunately, it is too small for a DSLR, so I will probably use my Nikon V1 as it is lighter and seems to have the longest battery life of my cameras (it uses the same battery as the D7000/D7100/D600).

 

http://photojojo.com/store/awesomeness/camalapse/

 

I am waiting for the snow to melt so I can try it.

 

Here are a couple other time-lapses I have done (these by the way, were shot with a tripod from my balcony stateroom):

 

 

 

[cutetrill]

Wow. You have been so extremly helpful. Thank you so much. I'll definitely be playing around with the camera before I go. I'll let you know how everything turns out!

[TheRoff]

I took quite a number of time lapse sequences on our recent Caribbean cruise which I am still working on processing. I used a light carbon fiber tripod from Manfrotto. It worked fine over the rail from our balcony and other parts of the ship. It collapses small enough to go into one of our rolling suit cases. A tripod may be a pain to carry, but I would highly recommend it.

 

As Awboater said, one thing to be aware of is your shooting interval. I thought gee, a slow moving big ship, a 3 second interval would work fine. Well, the good Emerald Princess looked like it was screaming. I would use a 1 second interval if your camera’s buffer will take that rate. The other thing to consider is the bouncy ship. The bounce usually wasn’t perceptible to us, but it certainly was to the camera and resulting footage. That is one reason I am still working on the images.

 

I am going to guess the Island Princess has the same blue tinted glass on its balconies like other Princess ships. If you can avoid it I wouldn’t try to shoot through it. They are generally pretty dirty and the blue color cast will be tricky to remove.

 

As for post processing, I would highly recommend Premiere or better yet, Premiere Pro. While the programs have a pretty steep learning curve, you will get the best results with powerful software.

 

And, here is a good place to go for lots of help on time lapse. Timescapes.org.

 

Good luck and have fun.

 

Larry