Step by step how to capture a timelapse movie

Jason Parnell-Brookes shows you how to create a tilt-shift timelapse movie to bring the so-called ‘toytown’ effect to life.

Clouds billowing over mountains and spilling into valleys; traffic zipping around busy streets; flowers bursting into life at a speed we don’t ordinarily get to see. These are just a few of the delights that timelapse photography offers. You see the world in a different timescale, and notice things you’ve never been aware of before, such as clouds in different parts of the sky moving in two opposing directions simultaneously.

A timelapse can be approached in at least two ways: recording a video and then speeding it up, or taking a series of photographs at regular intervals and turning these into a movie. The latter is where the magic truly happens.

By shooting still images and combining them you have more control over the final result, especially if you shoot in RAW – the ability to manipulate your images to the degree offered by RAW files will give your timelapses a quality you never thought possible.

Also, because you’re shooting stills you’ll be able to output to much higher resolutions, including 4K, so there’s opportunity to capture greater detail.

Shooting a timelapse movie with a tilt-shift lens adds another dimension, enabling you to create a moving version of the popular ‘toytown’ effect. The lens’s tilt and shift properties do different jobs.

Tilting (swinging the lens at an angle to your film or image sensor) controls which parts of the image are blurred and which are in sharp focus. Shifting enables you to correct converging verticals, which is especially useful in architectural photography.

For this tutorial we’ll be mainly using the tilt function of our tilt-shift lens to blur the top and bottom of the scene and create a shallow depth of field, to create the illusion of the world being miniature – you’ll often see the effect employed on the news or by documentary film-makers to convey the bustling life of a city.

In this tutorial we’ll show you how to set up your DSLR and capture the images for your timelapse, and how to edit and process your photos before turning them into a movie. So let’s break the process down into manageable chunks…

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Step by step: Shooting the sequence

1 Get up high
Find a location you’re happy with – a cityscape or country landscape in which there’s some movement is perfect – and try to find a high vantage point. Bright colours help with the toytown effect, too, so shoot in good weather, ideally with a few puffy clouds passing by if you’re including the sky.

SEE MORE: 10 quick landscape photography tips

2 Stay solid
Mount your camera on a tripod. You could place it on a wall or on top of a bag, but remember, the best timelapses are those in which the scene moves, not the camera, and the slightest camera movement can ruin the effect. If your tripod’s a bit wobbly, hang your camera bag from it.

SEE MORE: 6 camera tripod tips to keep your photos sharp

3 Find your angle
Experiment with the tilt of the lens and the aperture to get the effect you’re after. We found that looking down from a 20-30 degree angle and setting maximum tilt at the lens’s maximum aperture gave the best toytown effect. Include enough foreground/background for the blur to be obvious.

SEE MORE: How to use a tilt-shift lens to create a miniature effect

4 Set your focal point
Once you’ve got the tilt effect you’re after, use manual focusing to focus on the area in the frame you want to be sharp. If necessary, zoom in to 100% view in Live View to check that the area you want to be in focus is pin-sharp. Using manual focus will also stop the lens ‘hunting’.

SEE MORE: Manual focus for the 21st century: live view, electronic viewfinders and focus peaking explained

5 Avoid auto
Use manual mode for outdoor timelapses, otherwise your camera may alter the aperture or white balance halfway through due to changing light. For our timelapse, we set an aperture of f/3.5 at ISO100, and adjusted the shutter speed until we had a well-exposed image.

SEE MORE: Shooting in manual mode: when (and how) to take control of your camera

6 Shoot your sequence
To shoot our source images, we went into our D750’s menu, scrolled to ‘Photo shooting menu’ and selected ‘Interval Timer shooting’. From here we set a two-second interval for 500 shots, to give a 20-second video at 25 frames per second (see Step 3, below).

SEE MORE: Timelapse photography: show day turning to night in a single image

Interval timing

Timing is the key to creating an effective timelapse. The shorter the interval between photos, the faster the scene will move and vice versa. For slow-moving clouds, five seconds is a good interval; for fast-moving clouds try two seconds. Traffic will need one- or two-second intervals, depending on the distance of the vehicles from you and their speed. For our sequence we went for two seconds (see Step 6).

Quick TIP! When you’re exposing the first shot in your sequence, it’s a good idea to set the shutter speed for a correct exposure when then sun and/or scene is at its brightest. If you don’t, whenever the sun comes out you run the risk of an over-exposed sequence of images with blown highlights. If the sun goes in, you will end up with a slightly darker sequence of shots, but dark shadows are less distracting than blown highlights

SEE MORE: Your tilt-shift lens: more than just a miniature effect maker

Step by step: From stills to video

1 Edit one image
Import the images into Adobe Lightroom. Select your first photo, and adjust the white balance, exposure, contrast and so on as required – now is the time to recover highlights or boost saturation. You may want to add a Graduated Filter or vignette effect to bring focus to the centre of your image.

SEE MORE: The differences between Photoshop and Lightroom explained

2 Sync them all
Once you’ve edited the first photo, highlight the entire set (Cmd/Ctrl+A) and click the Sync button in the bottom-right of the window. This applies the edits you’ve made to all the images, which will save you an awful lot of time when you’ve got 500 photos to process.

SEE MORE: Batch Processing: step-by-step how to edit multiple photos in Photoshop

3 Set the framerate
Move to the Slideshow panel and select an LRTimelapse setting from the Template Browser. You’ll see settings for different frame rates – choose whichever is appropriate for your location (PAL video, used in the UK, runs at 25 frames per second; NTSC, used in the US, runs at 29.97fps).

SEE MORE: 10 pro photography tips that only come with experience

4 Export your movie
Make sure all of the images you want to use in your timelapse movie are selected (press Cmd/Ctrl+A to highlight the whole batch), then click on the Export Video button below the template browser. Name your video file, then click Save. Your video will now start to export.

5 And wait…
You may have to wait a while for your computer to export your high-res images to video, especially if it’s a relatively long timelapse, so now is the time to put your camera battery on charge or clean your lenses. Obviously, the longer the video, the longer it will take.

6 Share your shots
Once your timelapse has exported from Lightroom, you can play it using your preferred multimedia app (VLC, Windows Media Player, Quicktime etc). You can also upload it to social media – and if you fancy showing it off, be sure to share your results with us on Facebook or Twitter!

Quick TIP!
Don’t worry if you don’t own a tilt-shift lens. They don’t cost much to hire for a weekend, or you could simply shoot a timelapse with a standard lens. It will still look spectacular, it just won’t have the toytown feel.

Intervalometer

Note that not all D-SLRs feature Interval Timer shooting. If your camera doesn’t boast this feature, you can buy a dedicated intervalometer to fit it. They are similar to a remote release, but you can also program them to shoot a series of images at set intervals, irrespective of whether your camera has the feature built-in or not.

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