What is time-lapse photography?

Lead: In our daily life, the passage of time is always one? Uniform motion? We won't speed up, we won't go back, and the situation will change with time every day. We have long been used to living in such a fixed thinking world. Over time, it is inevitable that people will feel bored. Let's look at the novelty and shock brought by time-lapse photography.

Time-lapse photography is a new photography technology in recent years. It can span the two fields of photography and video shooting. By taking hundreds of photos regularly and synthesizing them into videos with software, static photos are dynamic while maintaining the high quality of photos. By controlling the shooting interval, various actions and changes in daily life can be accelerated at a high speed, which makes people have a huge visual impact and have a new understanding of the world we live in. Time-lapse photography can be regarded as the opposite of high-speed photography. Time-lapse photography is usually used to shoot urban scenery, natural scenery, astronomical phenomena, biological evolution and so on. The process of shooting time-lapse photography with a camera is similar to making a freeze frame, which connects single still pictures in series to get a dynamic video.

According to the film's benchmark, one second is 24 frames, which means that the interval between each frame is 1/24 seconds, so the shot image is what we see every day. However, if the interval between frames is increased to 1 sec, the picture composed of these frames will be 24 times faster than the normal shot image! That's it. This? 24 times the speed of the world? It appears in front of our eyes and brings us a completely different visual experience! Even some changes that we are not easily aware of in daily life will become obvious, such as the deviation of light and shadow in the room, the flow of white clouds in the blue sky and the rotation of stars in the night sky. These movements, which have never been clearly noticed by us, will be perfectly displayed in front of us by time-lapse shooting!

Realization method of time-lapse photography

After talking about the basic concept of time delay, how to achieve the effect of time delay in shooting? There are roughly two methods, the simplest of which can be realized by post-editing software or special effects software, but it will cause great waste. When shooting a few hours of video, if the delay effect is achieved by dropping frames, and finally converted into tens of minutes, then the number of dropped frames will be much more than last time. If we want to achieve higher-speed picture motion, this waste will undoubtedly be further expanded.

At this time, the second method shows its advantages. This method is to record a frame at regular intervals, which is the closest way to the original meaning of delay. At present, there are roughly two ways to realize this method. The first way is to use a camera. Nowadays, many cameras have this function. cmos can record a frame every once in a while through the built-in settings, which will not waste the captured image, but also achieve the effect of delay. The other is realized by means of a digital camera, which is much simpler than a camera. As long as the camera has a timing line release, it can automatically take a certain number of photos every certain time, and then import these photos into the nonlinear video editing software in the form of picture sequence, which can become a photo-level high-quality video.

The above two methods have their own advantages and disadvantages. It is relatively more convenient for the camera to directly record the delayed clips, and the requirements for computer configuration are not as high as those for processing photo sequences. But for friends who are crazy about photography, the requirements for the quality of their works are quite high. But the price of professional cameras is not so approachable, and the quality of low-end cameras is really difficult to satisfy our eyes. A work that can't satisfy the author, how to stimulate the author's creative desire? Let alone use it to impress the audience. Although the quality of high-end cameras is satisfactory to us, the price is beyond our affordability. The sky-high price of180,000 or even hundreds of thousands makes us regret not being born into a rich family.

At this time, the advantages of shooting time-delayed works with SLR cameras far cover up its disadvantages. Quan Huafu's fuselage and a few good lenses usually cost less than 40,000 yuan. For those of us who like photography, the equipment is ready-made, so the shooting cost is much lower. In addition, the camera's pixels have also begun to enter the 20 million pixel mark. That is to say, by cutting the shot picture sequence, you can completely get the works with 4K photo quality, and the cost is much lower than buying hundreds of thousands of cameras. Moreover, SLR can use the photographer's existing photo color matching technology to complete video color matching, and the camera's raw format file also makes its later space quite large. Quan Huafu SLR's powerful high sense can easily shoot the night sky. These decisive advantages make camera shooting time-delayed works become the most mainstream method in the world today, so we naturally choose to use cameras.

Time-lapse photography with a camera can broaden our thinking. In fact, there are many excellent time-delay works shot by SLR abroad, such as the famous Time scapes, which can also give us a lot of inspiration.