Archive for July, 2010

Smooth Zooming and Panning Time Lapse

Jul 14th

Posted by Andy in Photography

3 comments

I have worked out a method to allow zooming and panning for time lapse movies. More work is still needed, but here is a short sample of storms last Saturday.

Forest Fire Time Lapse

Jul 12th

Posted by Andy in Photography

Here is another time lapse, this time of a five acre forest fire on the mountain range outside of Tucson. The fire is about 10 miles away. The time lapse was created using 10MP images with the camera at full 3x optical zoom. The images were then cropped to 1920 x 1080 to create a high definition movie.

The total elapsed time shown was one hour and 41 minutes, compressed into two minutes at 24 frames per second.

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Motorized Panning During Time Lapses

Jul 7th

Posted by Andy in Photography

A time lapse video can be made to look really good if the camera is panned while the picture taking happens. The result is smooth motion during the video, and there are plenty of examples of this on You Tube.

There are lots of ways to make cheap panning mechanisms, with the most popular involving an old egg timer. However these approaches have some limitations:

  1. Once the panning starts you don’t stop it, even if you panned away from an area where something happened 10 minutes after the start
  2. The panning is typically a linear motion – the same speed all the time
  3. Most panning mechanisms do not have vertical panning, only horizontal

Number one comes from the limitation of having to set up the motion before starting to take the pictures. It can be difficult to anticipate in advance what might happen in the scene and once it does even if the motion was somehow changed, it would have to change slowly to avoid disrupting the video in a jarring way, missing the item of interest anyway.

Number two can be solved by using a PC or microcontroller to control the camera motion in more complex ways. However this is added time and expense for design and setup.

Number three can be solved by using two motors, one for horizontal and one for vertical. Again, unless the motion is very simple and defined in advance, a PC or microcontroller would be needed.

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