Yesterday I received my new equipment, an intervalometer (it’s a word), a neutral density filter and a brand new battery pack for my Canon dSLR.
The interval-thingy basically allows me to set up any kind of time frame with intervals and exposure delays. I set it up for an infinite amount of pictures with an interval of 20 seconds (second half of the movie I dropped it down to 10 seconds to get the slow-down effect). The shutter speed was relatively normal, 1/25 of a second as clouds don’t really move THAT quickly. I will experiment with much slower shutter speeds at night sometime.
Now I know this is a cheesy one to start with, but I had an hour lunch-break and an open window right next to me.
I managed to get around 150 pictures, I removed one or two that had a flock of birds in them to avoid blips, but that also caused some jumping of the video – so I realised there’s an element of luck in this as well.
I used Quicktime 7 Pro to create a movie from an image sequence, and set that to 15fps. I’ll add a soundtrack to the next ones as they get longer and a little more elaborate.
The outcome was better than I expected – I didn’t realise the amount of movement clouds make on a regular day in a relatively short amount of time. You can see the video slow down dramatically after a few seconds as I shortened the interval between frames (but kept the playback frame rate the same). This was just for me to get an idea of what different intervals will produce at 15fps, a good reference point for me to work on.
And here we go, attempt number 1 – look out for more.