Post #7, Lessons

Two weeks ago, I decided I would try to make my first time-lapse video (see previous post).  Here I would like to share some lessons I learned from that experience:

1.  Be Patient
Time lapse pictures are taken on intervals; when your interval is maybe one and a half minutes, by an hour, you will have maybe 40 pictures to show for that hour that passed.  Passing through 40 pictures in a time lapse video will take maybe 40 seconds if you want to bore your viewers (one second for each picture).  While I'm not setting out to make stunning time-lapse videos on my first attempt at this, I don't want to bore people either.  So I learned to allow myself more time taking pictures, maybe two to three hours!  Which leads me to...

2.  Buy an Intervalometer
Can you imagine staring at your cell phone or other timer in the dark, and pressing the shutter every minute and half?  Well, that is what I did my first night out:  I set my stopwatch on my phone and pressed the shutter as close to a minute and half as I could get.  This was a tedious process and also inaccurate.  I hope to buy an intervalometer to make this process more pleasant for myself, and also, more accurate, as the shutter speed will not vary between still photos, and the intervals will be precise.

3.  Plan in Advance
When I set out for this first adventure, I knew I wanted to shoot the Milky Way.  I found a spot where the Milky Way was visible, but the surrounding landscape was not great.  There was a radio tower in my shot; I could not get it out of frame without picking up something else distracting.  Also, I wanted to take pictures shooting north, toward the North Star.  The rotation of the earth is most evident around the North Star in time lapse photos.  However, since I had only allowed myself an hour to shoot these pictures, I ended up shooting the Milky Way's progression for 40 minutes, and the North Star's progression for 20 minutes.  So I ended up with 20 pictures for the Milky Way and maybe 10 for the other...this does not make for a long, or interesting video!

4.  Post-Editing Can be Fun, but it Takes Work
Finally, with the photos I had, I set out to compile these pictures into a video.  I have a monthly subscription to the Adobe Creative Cloud, with access to Photoshop and also Premiere Pro, used often for video editing and compiling.  I had no experience with Premiere Pro, and looked at several tutorials on using the product, including this one:



The first thing I found out was that the landscape format is preferable in video editing.  I unfortunately shot my pictures vertically.   I'm still working on a solution to this, but I'm afraid I will have to crop my video to fit the preferred landscape format.

The second thing I learned is that no matter how good I think I am in learning new software, it will take work to actually pick it up.  It can be frustrating to learn something new, but you have to allow yourself the patience to pick up the experience needed to learn the new software.  I'm still working to learn this software; hopefully it will get better with time (as a college student, I don't have much spare time on this, sad to say!)

So these are my lessons on time-lapse photography.  I hope to share a video I made by the end of the semester, or within the next year.  Some of the best time-lapse videos (below) I've seen have been shot throughout months of a year.