After many days of clear skies in Vancouver, cloud and rain was, frustratingly, due to arrive just at the peak of the annual Perseid meteor shower.
Although the peak of the shower was on Tuesday evening/Wednesday morning, the best chance to capture any meteors appeared to be on Monday night, although the combination of a full moon and very hazy conditions would make capturing any very tricky. Still, I figured it was worth a try, so I headed up the Sea to Sky Highway to see if I could capture any.
Unfortunately, as well as thicker haze than I've ever seen in this area, shortly after setting up my camera, clouds swept across, obscuring most of the sky. While I don't believe I caught a single meteor, I thought the sequence of shots, with the foreground flickering between bright and dark as the moon kept being hidden behind clouds, was worth making into a quick timelapse movie.
To add to the weird and uncooperative weather conditions, on walking back to the car a sudden flash of bright sheet lightning a couple of miles away gave me a bit of a fright!
The short timelapse is comprised of 269 photos, each taken at 16mm, f/3.5, ISO 2000, for 15 seconds.
I'm a British software developer and photographer living in Vancouver, BC. I mainly photograph landscapes, cityscapes, night scenes, and water.
If you're interested in any...
OMG! This is so amazingly beautiful! Didn't know you could post a time
lapse on this site. My husband's an astrophotographer and he loved seeing this too!
Very cool... I have thought about doing a timelapse a few times but have no idea where to start regards interval between shots. What was the interval on this one and what fps did you play the frames at?
@gazbadger Thanks! I shot this intending to capture as many meteors as possible (hah!), so the intention was to minimise the time the shutter was closed (every second it's closed is a potential meteor missed). So in this case there was no interval at all, the camera was set to take 15 second exposures (chosen to avoid star trails, and to optimise the exposure when combined with the ISO and aperture), in continuous high-speed mode, with the shutter locked open, so as soon as one exposure finished, the next one started. As such, it took just over an hour to take these 269 photos.
With timelapse work, it's often better to take more photos than you think you'll need, as you can always drop frames if the timelapse goes too slowly, but the only way to slow down a timelapse that doesn't last long enough is to reduce the framerate, causing jerkiness. As I only had enough frames for a 9 second timelapse at 30 frames per second, I chose to play this at half-speed, or 15 frames per second, making the clip last approximately 18 seconds, and causing the not-quite-smooth feel. (With the GIF animation here it'll depend slightly on your computer -- the YouTube clip is 18 seconds long).
Ideally I'd always play back timelapse footage at 30 frames per second, but this wasn't shot with the intention of making a timelapse :) (The other important thing to remember when intentionally shooting a timelapse is to keep the camera in landscape format!)
When using an interval (in daylight, for example), I usually consider how long I'm planning the shoot to take, and how long I want the final clip to be. For example, if you're shooting for 12 hours, then 10 seconds between shots might be a bit too often -- that would be 4,320 frames, or 144 seconds at 30 frames per second, longer than most people will want to watch a single scene unless it's amazingly diverse (although as above, you can simply choose to use every other shot, or every fourth shot, to speed the clip up).
Equally, if I'm shooting a sunrise or sunset clip, which might only last twenty minutes in 'real time', 10 seconds between shots might be a bit low, resulting in a timelapse clip that was only 4 seconds long at 30 frames per second, which can be rather fleeting even in a sequence of timelapse clips, let alone as a standalone clip.
@abirkill Thanks mate... that's a really great explanation. It seems I will have to crunch some numbers once I decide where and what I want to timelapse. Thanks so much for going into so much detail... I really appreciate that.
lapse on this site. My husband's an astrophotographer and he loved seeing this too!
With timelapse work, it's often better to take more photos than you think you'll need, as you can always drop frames if the timelapse goes too slowly, but the only way to slow down a timelapse that doesn't last long enough is to reduce the framerate, causing jerkiness. As I only had enough frames for a 9 second timelapse at 30 frames per second, I chose to play this at half-speed, or 15 frames per second, making the clip last approximately 18 seconds, and causing the not-quite-smooth feel. (With the GIF animation here it'll depend slightly on your computer -- the YouTube clip is 18 seconds long).
Ideally I'd always play back timelapse footage at 30 frames per second, but this wasn't shot with the intention of making a timelapse :) (The other important thing to remember when intentionally shooting a timelapse is to keep the camera in landscape format!)
When using an interval (in daylight, for example), I usually consider how long I'm planning the shoot to take, and how long I want the final clip to be. For example, if you're shooting for 12 hours, then 10 seconds between shots might be a bit too often -- that would be 4,320 frames, or 144 seconds at 30 frames per second, longer than most people will want to watch a single scene unless it's amazingly diverse (although as above, you can simply choose to use every other shot, or every fourth shot, to speed the clip up).
Equally, if I'm shooting a sunrise or sunset clip, which might only last twenty minutes in 'real time', 10 seconds between shots might be a bit low, resulting in a timelapse clip that was only 4 seconds long at 30 frames per second, which can be rather fleeting even in a sequence of timelapse clips, let alone as a standalone clip.