Time Lapse Photography

Like capturing pictures of lightning, animation and time lapse photography is something that I've always been rather fascinated with over the years. The art of taking delayed still photos over a long period of time and replaying them back into a video clip.
Below you will find a few animations I have created. Feel free to explore them. I do plan on adding more, as I get around to creating them. But for now, you'll just have to see what I have now.


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Low Clouds
I got this clip just after a good rain and the clouds were doing some strange stuff. I hardly ever see them this low and across the side of the mountains like that. So I grabbed the camera and tripod and set it up on the front deck. Unfortunately the deck is not as stable as I had hoped, as you can see from the shake of the clip. I didn't use the laptop with the timer program, so I just manually took all 107 frames, just counting off to 10, and then, further into the clip I raised that to 15, and then to 20, and then to 30, to speed things up a bit. But at the very end I took a bunch of shots close together, to give me a few moments at the tail end of the clip for the clouds to slow down.
     

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Thunderstorm Reborn
This latest clip took quite a while to put together. Not because it was all that difficult. But just because I kept screwing things up, myself. After setting up the camera to look out of the window, and being very careful with the position, I must have bumped it or the table before I left the room, and the upper right corner of the image had a part of the window frame in it. So I ended up with 600 pictures with the same window frame in every one of them. But after importing them all into my graphics program, to create the video clip, I discovered that my graphics program actually allowed me to crop and resize all of the frames. Boy was I happy. So I cropped out the window frame and put the video together.

This video clip is, as I stated before, comprised of 600 frames. Each one taken 15 seconds apart, the time frame for this event was about 1.5 hours total, which amazed me as to how much atmospheric activity there was in that short time frame, and displays how quickly these monsoon storms can dissipate or build up. I compiled all the images together to 33 milliseconds each, creating a video clip here of a total of 19 seconds.

Well I finally got my time lapse video of a thunderstorm forming. But I never expected that I would get one fading away, and then forming again, all in such a short time. As you can see at the beginning, the sky was quite filled with moisture and rain clouds. But then, as I had captured before, they all seemed as though they were dying down and fading away. But then they build up again and grow in intensity to form another thunderstorm.
Boy, you just got to love the monsoon seasons out here in Arizona.

 

   

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Thunder Clouds Dying
The following clip was an interesting experiment. As I have been wanting to capture one of these thunderstorms building up over the mountains, I thought I was going to get my chance. I saw this cloud that had built up and wanted to quickly get home so I could try to catch it as it grew into a massive thunderstorm. After all, it is the monsoon season. So I got home and set up the camera to take 200 pictures at 20 second intervals. But I was rather disappointed as, instead of getting a series of images of a storm growing, I got the opposite, and the storm just seemed to fizzle out and all the clouds faded away.
     

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Reverse Clouds
I tried reversing the video clip to see if the growing clouds would look good, but for some reason, and maybe it's just me, I thought it still looked like it was running backwards. I guess clouds just don't really form that way, and it was obviously backwards.
But in any case, here are my results below. With several different sizes for those that don't want to wait so long for it to download.
     

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  Venus Rising
This first one was actually my first attempt and experiment with time lapse photography. It consists of only 30 images, manually taken, of the planet Venus while it was rising one morning. Here I took the images, put them all together, and then attached them again, in reverse to create this short  video clip.
     

 
More?
So, what's next? 
Well, I'm planning on getting some time lapse footage of the sun setting, some flowers blooming, and quite possibly, with a little more work, the stars moving across the sky.
 And from there? Who knows?

Please feel free to email me with feedback about these new adventures in photography.
Danny@Galixy.net