Skills of time-lapse photography with digital camera?

Time-lapse photography is a photography technique, which uses a time-lapse device to shoot a certain number of images or videos at a lower f

Skills of time-lapse photography with digital camera?

Time-lapse photography is a photography technique, which uses a time-lapse device to shoot a certain number of images or videos at a lower frame rate during the movement of the subject, and then connect them in series to play the pictures at a normal or faster rate, and finally get a dynamic video. Let me introduce it to you below, hoping to help you.

First, preparation for shooting

* * * A * * digital camera

The larger the size of the photosensitive element, the better the picture obtained by the digital SLR camera.

* * * Two * * * delay devices

Some models of digital cameras have built-in "interval shooting" function. If you don't have this function, you need to buy a cable releaser with "interval shooting" function, or choose to connect the camera with the computer with USB cable and control it on the computer side through software.

* * * Three * * stabilizers for supporting the camera.

In the process of shooting, a sufficiently stable supporting device is very important. Tripod is the most commonly used. If you want to shoot a set of time-lapse photography clips with different perspectives, you need equipment such as tracks and cars.

* * * Four * * medium gray filters

Medium gray filter, also known as subtractive mirror, is used to reduce the amount of light entering under the condition of sufficient illumination, and uses a low-speed shutter to reduce the probability of shutter flicker.

* * * Five * * * memory cards

Memory card is not only a matter of storage size, but also the storage speed of the card will affect the shooting interval. High speed and large capacity memory card is preferred.

* * * Six * * * batteries

Adequate power supply is the basis of time-lapse photography.

Second, the camera settings

* * * Aperture setting

The aperture size should be set manually. Always use the same aperture to get photos with the same depth of field. Generally, the setting value should not be too small, and attention should be paid to avoid the change of image quality caused by diffraction limit aperture. Generally speaking, F 1 1 is a suitable aperture.

* * * Two * * shutter settings

Shutter speed should be set manually. Always use the same shutter speed to get the same picture effect with the same degree of motion solidification. The setting value should not be too fast, and about 1/50 seconds is usually a suitable speed.

Human eyes are used to seeing dynamic blurred video images. When the images taken by high-speed shutter are combined into a video, each frame is still and clear, which looks like a flickering picture, which is very unnatural. So slow down the shutter speed when shooting.

* * * Three * * Sensitivity Settings

Sensitivity should be set manually. Usually, the sensitivity setting value should not be too large, so attention should be paid to avoid the noise caused by too high sensitivity, which will affect the image quality. General shooting should try to use low sensitivity.

* * * Four * * White Balance Settings

Fixed white balance setting can get delayed picture effect with equal color temperature. Automatic white balance setting can get the picture effect of color temperature change, but it is prone to white balance flicker, which is generally avoided as much as possible. It is recommended to shoot in RAW format. After post-processing, the white balance can be adjusted at will without loss of image quality.

* * * Five * * * focus settings

Manual focusing can get a picture effect with the same focus; Turn on autofocus, because the movement of the scene may lead to the change of focus, which is easy to cause shooting mistakes; At the same time, manual focusing is more energy-saving and can extend the camera's delayed shooting time.

* * * Six * * * Interval Settings

The time interval of delayed shooting will directly affect the final picture effect. Only by making clear the final picture speed effect, lens length and shooting time span can the time interval of delayed shooting be decided.

For most topics, the speed of the object should be considered first, so as to obtain a more natural video. For example, it takes 15 minutes to shoot the theme of "crowd flow". You need to shoot a frame every 2 seconds to naturally show the delayed picture of crowd movement. After taking 450 photos, you will get a delayed film of about 18 seconds.

Third, the causes and solutions of video flicker

Video flicker is mainly manifested as irregular flicker of brightness and color in time-lapse photography video images. The causes of flicker can be summarized as follows:

* * * A * * aperture flashes. Due to the design and structure of the current camera autofocus lens, the actual aperture of the aperture will not shrink to the same exact fixed position every time when shooting, which is usually difficult to detect when shooting a single photo, but it will become very obvious when shooting a large number of continuous photos and splicing them into a video.

Solution: Use a lens that can manually fix the aperture. It has also been suggested that the aperture size should be set first, and the aperture size should be fixed with the depth of field preview button, and then the lens should be quickly removed to make its aperture fixed, and then the communication point between the lens and the fuselage should be covered to fool the camera to avoid the problem of aperture flicker.

* * * The shutter flashes twice. Due to the design and construction of the shutter element of the current camera, the shutter will not be maintained at a fixed value every time when shooting, which is usually difficult to detect when shooting a single photo, but it will become very obvious when shooting a large number of continuous photos and splicing them into a video, especially when the shutter speed is high.

Solution: Avoid using high-speed shutter.

* * * Three * * natural flashes. When the camera shoots with automatic shift * * * including shift * * * in an environment with large contrast or drastic light changes, the exposure value will change and flicker due to photometry.

* * * Four * * Normally, the first three situations can be avoided to the greatest extent by manually fixing the exposure value, focusing, white balance and keeping the slow shutter. However, when shooting scenes with large light changes such as sunrise and sunset, the flicker of time-lapse photography is almost inevitable.

If the RAW format or bracketing exposure is used in the early stage, and then the single frame is manually adjusted in the later stage, in principle, every frame with flicker can be manually adjusted to avoid screen flicker as much as possible, but the workload of this process is too huge.

At present, the following post-softwares and plug-ins are known to help eliminate flicker: GBdeflicker plug-in of VirtualDubAfter Effect; Color stabilizer; The final shearing average exposure function of each frame, etc. After trial, the above software has certain effect, but it has not completely solved the flicker problem, so it is suggested to strengthen the early control.

Fourth, post-production.

There are many softwares for synthesizing single-frame photos into videos, such as: Photolapse 3, VirtualDub, QuickTime, Premiere, Lightroom, Final Cut, After Effects and so on, but not limited to these. Of course, an excellent time-lapse photography video needs to add music and use a lot of editing skills, which will not be discussed in this paper for the time being.