This morning —about 30 mins before sunrise— I decided I wanted to take a time lapse of the beginning of the day.

Rooftop: Rough Cut from Josh Pesavento on Vimeo.

I tethered my Nikon D50 to my MacBook using a USB A to Mini B cable. (It’s likely the camera comes with one of these, I had to purchase a new one.) Then I mounted my camera on my light stand (out of necessity), and took the whole kit to the roof. I also wore warm clothes over my regular clothes, and brought a pillow. I had no intention of falling asleep, but to be prepared for if I did I ran the free program iAlertU, which sets off an alarm if someone attempts to do anything with the computer - it also takes a picture of the person and emails it to the address of your choice using mail.app

Once everything was ready, I fired off some test shots and did a little math, then set the time lapse function in Camera Control Pro to 30 seconds.. and waited.

(Math includes: How many shots I’ll need at a certain frame rate for a movie of a certain length, what size photo I should take, and if I’ll have enough battery life to do what I want to.)

When night became day, I wasn’t through taking photos. I moved my setup around the roof, and changed the delay duration for different shots. I also took some photos by hand, which the computer takes in like any other capture. This is particularly useful for focus and zoom effects.

The movie was made by selecting the “open image sequence” command in quicktime, and exporting to .mov files, which I put together in iMovie.

It’s titled rough cut, because I have a trick or two I still want to put in action on this (or other) time lapse footage. More on that later.

Music:
Btoum-Roumada by Aphex Twin on the Drukqs album.

Location:
Bushwick - Brooklyn, NYC

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 16th, 2008 at 2:08 pm and is filed under Tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. Edit this entry.