5 SIMPLE Tips to Shoot AWESOME Timelapse Photography

hello everyone Michael Shane bloom here if you follow this channel for a while you know that I love time-lapse photography I love incorporating time-lapse into my video projects and I'm going to share with you a few tricks and tips that I've learned over the years that's going to help you to produce better time lapses just to start this out I mean time-lapse is so accessible now that I mean even on your cell phone you can shoot a pretty good time-lapse so it's not necessarily about the gear but there is one piece of gear you might consider if you're getting started with time-lapse and your camera does not have a built-in intervalometer alright this is an intervalometer or a camera trigger release and this allows the camera to take pictures over time at a set interval so I could set this to every one second and for every time this clicks it's going to click a photo it's very simple very basic and I think you can buy these on Amazon for about 15 20 bucks personally I buy the cheap ones they have name-brand ones they're like two or three hundred dollars these usually work out well sometimes they break all if you buy two of them it's still only like 40 bucks or even less one thing I like to do put a little bit of velcro on the back so that you can attach it to a tripod but this is what you're going to use to trigger the camera if your camera does not have a built-in trigger release so tip number one is understanding your interval what your interval needs to be to get the best possible motion now a lot of people think when they first get started with time-lapse if you run the longest possible shot that's going to give you the best possible motion it might give you the most motion but it's not going to be the best sometimes slowing that camera down and taking very quick intervals is going to be your best option some of my favorite time lapses I've only run for maybe six to seven minutes where people look at the footage and think that it's actually been shot for about an hour so understanding your interval is important and the best tip I can give you is the quicker something is moving generally the faster you want your interval to be so if you're shooting cars and people moving around the streets you might consider a one-second interval so that that camera clicks every one second and you only have to run the shot for five or six minutes to get enough photos to produce a nice time-lapse but slower moving objects like the Milky Way you're gonna want a twenty to thirty second interval so that you can actually see the movement of the star since they're moving so slowly so just understanding your interval based on the subject that you want to show is very important and it's going to produce the best possible results for you tip number two is to always shoot in RAW now this is going to produce a whole lot of data you're gonna need some fast memory cards and some extra harddrive space but if you want to edit your time lapses and get the best possible quality I always recommend shooting raw for your time lapses that's what I do every single time regardless of what I'm shooting because I know in Lightroom or in Photoshop or in another editing software I'm going to be able to want to process those time lapses same as you would with photography you'd shoot in RAW so that you can process the photo afterwards tip number three is to shoot slight long exposures to blur out your subject now when you do super short exposures you can get this thing called the staccato effect and it makes things look a little choppy it makes the motion look choppy when you see a car go boom boom boom and it's very still it looks choppy it's like stop-motion but you add a little bit of motion blur onto that car and suddenly it feels as though it's zooming through the frame now if you're trying to produce tilt-shift shots and you want to make things look like little miniature objects it might be good to shoot a quicker shutter speed but for most time-lapse to get the smoothest possible motion you want a little bit of motion blur in there especially if you're shooting something like water the other benefit to shooting a slight long exposure is that if you have any birds moving through the frame it's going to blur out the birds and you won't have to clone them out later which is really annoying and you don't want to do that I can't tell you how much time I've sat in front of the computer cloning out birds so any possible way of avoiding that I'm always going to choose to do now of course if you're shooting during the day you can't knock that shutter speed down too far without something like a filter so here's one of the filters I use this one is I believe a six stop filter if I'm shooting anything during sunset I usually use a six stop that's enough to knock down my shutter speed get like half a second if I'm shooting in broad daylight just like mid daylight I'll use a ten stop filter to really knock that down tip number four is to shoot the time lapses in manual now I know what you're thinking but what about when the city lights are turning on and you're going from day to night that is an exception and for that you might consider a different alternative method like using aperture priority mode but you're gonna run into issues where you have to fix all the flicker that's going to go on in the shots as that exposure changes and as the light meter tries to compensate you're gonna see inconsistencies in the exposure that you're gonna need to smooth out with a program like LR time-lapse and it can be a little bit advanced to learn so if you're getting started I recommend shooting all your time lapses on manual if you're shooting sunset over expose the frame a little bit just to the point where you're clipping the highlights and let the exposure fall into place during the time lapse or vice versa if you're shooting a sunrise I will say about 90% of my time lapses maybe even more are shot in manual so using the aperture priority mode method really is only good in my opinion for long-term lighting changes like day to night shots and to be honest I don't do those that often most of the time it's on manual another quick tip just make sure auto focus is off simple as that it can ruin your shot you can get a little bit of a focus shift in between frames and you don't want that so easy enough to just make sure it's on manual alright my biggest tip is not a technical one but I think it's the most important and it's just to get out there practice practice practice and express your creativity try unique ideas it might not work out but there's no harm in trying try different intervals try different subject matter don't just focus on one thing - time lapse really just play around and experiment because some of my favorite time lapses I've ever done there was a lot of uncertainty if they were gonna work out and it was merely just an experiment those ended up being the ones that were my favorites so get out there have fun shoot time-lapse if you haven't already subscribed to the channel I really appreciate you watching this video I'll be putting out more tutorials tricks and tips and a new vlog series in Oregon with Gavin aka photo tripper where we chase the Milky Way and I think we're also releasing a pretty awesome Milky Way course as well so I'll catch you in the next one [Music] sounded pretty good oh yeah tip number two let's tip number two tip number two why can't I remember tip number two I should have written I should her at know this down how many tips did I do I'll catch you a nice one the camera transition oh boy

Channel: Michael Shainblum

Views: 37,798

Keywords: timelapse tutorial, timelapse tricks and tips, how to shoot a timelapse

Id: YynJMCuc06c

Length: 7min 40sec (460 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 20 2019