What is time-lapse photography?

Lead: time-lapse photography, long-time fixed-frame time-lapse photography. Also known as low-speed photography or fixed-time photography, contraction time? Photography. A means to record and reproduce the slow changing process of the scene with obvious changing images at regular intervals. Let's take a closer look at what time-lapse photography is.

For example, it takes about 3 days and 3 nights for a bud to bloom, which is 72 hours. Shoot one frame of it every half hour, record the subtle changes of flowering action in turn, shoot 144 frame at * * *, then show it with a projector at normal frequency (24 frames per second), and reproduce the flowering process for 3 days and 3 nights within 6 seconds.

In nature, such as cell division, egg hatching, solar eclipse, cloud change, astronomy, geography and other disciplines, time-lapse photography is often used to accumulate scientific research data. Photographers use it for artistic creation, and the pictures they get are very shocking:

Time-lapse photography originated from special effects in film shooting. The movie takes advantage of human visual delay to play 24 photos a second, thus forming the illusion of dynamic pictures. It is one of the laws of film development that the plot changes from slow rhythm to fast rhythm. After the appearance of fast-paced action movies and disaster movies, people are not satisfied with seeing fleeting wonderful pictures. Cinematographers have developed the techniques of fast shooting and slow playing.

When shooting, adjust the quantity. The photos taken by the film camera every second make the number of films taken per second far more than 24, and then play them at the normal frame rate (* * films per second are generally called * * frames). The original high-speed action was broken down, that is, slow motion. The technology of shooting movies in slow motion is called high-speed photography.

Images captured by high-speed cameras

People soon found that if the frame rate of the camera is reduced, a normal picture is taken and then displayed in a normal frame of 24 frames, the video will become a snapshot. If you have enough patience, you can see eclipses and clouds in a short time by this method. Time lapse photography was born.

Freeze-frame camera, automatic delay controller, regulated power supply, lighting, and other equipment that ordinary people can't touch were once necessary conditions for time-delay photography. For modern people, it is obviously much easier. A digital camera with manual exposure function, a cable releaser with time delay function, a stable tripod, and of course, if you have excellent patience, you can also take time delay photography. Take the simplest and easiest cloud change as an example:

When the sun appears in the field of view of the lens, a hood should be used.

Wide-angle lens can get a larger angle of view and can contain quite a few moving elements. The perspective law of near big and far small will be strengthened by short-focus lens, and the video will be very stereoscopic. Wide-angle lens also has a great depth of field, and time-lapse photography adopts fixed focus to ensure the clarity of moving objects. As long as your composition skills are excellent, the big scene is the easiest to get excellent visual impact. Pocketslider time-lapse shooting uses Sigma super wide-angle lens.

The composition is absolutely fixed. Use a tripod that is stable enough to keep the ground unchanged, lock the foot joint and the tripod head, and turn off the anti-shake function of the camera. In order to ensure the absolute stillness of the camera, the cable should be released when shooting, and the camera and lens should not be touched when shooting. In fact, many digital cable releases already have delay control function, such as Nikon -MC-36, which can set the number and interval of shooting.

Continuous exposure and white balance. Fully automatic or priority exposure mode is never allowed. In time-lapse photography, we should follow the subject scene whose brightness changes with time. AWB mode cannot be used to control the white balance of colors. Use manual exposure M mode to fix a certain color temperature or scene white balance mode. When shooting in the morning, the exposure will be reduced by a certain exposure value according to the exposure meter. With the enhancement of sunlight, the picture will be brighter and brighter. When shooting at dusk, you can directly use the combination measured by the exposure meter, and the scene will gradually fade. Shutter settings should ensure the clarity of each piece of paper. Don't operate the camera during the whole shooting.

Use manual focusing and locking. When shooting changing clouds, aim the lens at the clouds in the sky, and aim the clouds in the field of vision of the lens near 1/3 as much as possible. You can use autofocus calibration and switch to manual focus immediately after it is accurate. If autofocus is used in time-lapse photography, the picture will be slightly offset, and if it is serious, AF will not be started halfway and shooting will be terminated.

I prefer cable release operation with interval function. Your patience is not necessarily better than mine. Set one every two minutes to ten minutes (the shutter is determined according to the wind, and the faster the wind speed, the shorter the interval). The whole shooting time depends on the video length you want. The next step is to import the photos into nonlinear editing software and edit them into movies in sequence.

The success of time-lapse photography depends not only on technology, but also on discovery, creativity, persistence and perseverance to withstand loneliness.