Kimta Peak Time-LapseSun., Jul. 24, 2005 10:55:55
As many of you know, the company I work for, Harbortronics, sells digital camera time-lapse controllers. For some time now I've had access to this equipment, but never taken advantage of it because I couldn't think of anything that deserved taking a couple hundred pictures of. The equipment for this is very light (excluding my 2 lb camera, which I had anyway) so I opted to bring it with me on the Skyline Trail trip I did with my dad, despite my minimalist approach in hope of an ultra light-weight pack.
Two days into the trip, I was beginning to doubt whether I'd come up with anything good to take a time-lapse of. We were camped on a ridge that was completely socked in. I took some pictures of interesting close-up objects and got in my sleeping bag fairly early. Just after the sun went down, the clouds started clearing up. I peaked out of my sleeping bag and witnessed a beautiful twilight glow with silhouetted mountains and clouds rolling out of the valley. This was the type of scenery I had brought the time-lapse gear for.
I got out of my sleeping bag, and set the stuff up. It took all of about 10 seconds to change the mode on the camera to night-landscape and hit the one button on the DigiSnap to start the time-lapse. I didn't remember until a few minutes later to turn the camera to Basic image compression and Small pictures size (before then I was taking pictures at 6.1 Megapixel... 1.5 MB a piece!). I had to resize the pictures with the batch tool in Photoshop so they were all of equal size before I could assemble my video.
Mark at Harbortronics had told me that he uses QuickTime to assemble his time-lapse videos, so I "got" QuickTime Pro and tried to get the video assembled. The help file for QuickTime indicated that when you open an "image sequence" a pop-up will appear where you can specify frames per second. I never found this pop-up. Needless to say, when I viewed the video, it had no control over how long each image was displayed, and it looked to me as through it were playing it as fast of the computer specs would permit. It looked horrible and choppy.
A few days later, I remembered that my friend Stephen had said that Windows Movie Maker could handle image slideshows. It took me a while to download and install Movie Maker, as it was not listed on the Windows Update site as indicated by Microsoft's download site. I had to find another source. C|Net triumphs again. I struggled a little bit trying to figure out how to set a .125 (I was trying for .1, but apparently .125 is the limit) second duration for each image. Eventually I read the help file which indicated there was a default value changeable in the advanced tab of the Options menu. This helped a lot. Now all I had to do was import the images, select them all, and drag them into the timeline below. Very easy. Compressing the video was very easy also. Just hit Save to My Computer in the Finish Movie section.
I was very pleased with the outcome of my movie, as was I with some other still pictures I took that night. My Nikon D70, DigiSnap 2100, Windows Movie Maker, and most of all the weather, served me very well to produce a superb outcome (in my mind) helping to understand the beautiful scenes seen when backpacking in the Olympic Mountains of Washington state.
Video: Kimta Time Lapse.wmv (853 KB)
Still: Skyline Trail #151
Some other great shots I got that night:
Skyline Trail #152
Skyline Trail #153
Skyline Trail #155
Skyline Trail #156
Enjoy!
CommentsYou finally blogged! I thought you were going for a record there. You know, you could have used the time you were blogging to wake me up. I was kind of hoping you would. Oh well. I'm glad you finally blogged, and that time lapse thing is really cool. Now you need to do the banana. That would be cool, too.
Tag You should put photos in your blog more often, like you did with the one about course 4. It makes it more interesting, and astetically (sp?) pleasing.
Liz Add Comment
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