Flower Time Lapse movie – Yellow Daffodils Blooming
I decided to re-do my first flower time lapse – blooming Daffodils. This time I knew what mistakes I made in my previous attempt. I re-checked all my settings three times, made sure the exposure was set to a bit under in order not to blow out the bright yellow flowers, and everything was on manual.
I also used a black background behind the Daffodils to give my photos a lot more contrast and just focus on the main subject rather than being distracted by the background.
Again I left my camera connected to the mains in order not to worry about batteries. Calculated how long it would take to fill up my entire memory card and set up a reminder on my phone.
I tried not to go into the room in order to avoid creating air movement which might move the delicate flowers slightly and ruin the shot a bit. I only went inside to change the memory card. I later discovered this software for my Macbook that controls the camera and downloads every image to the hard drive. You can try such setup if you have a spare laptop you can just leave in your ‘studio’ for many hours. I can’t usually live without my laptop for longer than 10 minutes so I only use it if I know for sure I will run out of memory space on my card and the recording doesn’t take longer than a couple of hours.
It took over 17 hours for the flowers to fully open and the camera was set on 2 minute intervals.
Stitched in Time Lapse Assembler.
Pictures gently post-processed from RAWs in Lightroom.
Nikon D200 connected to the mains.
Two LED continuous lights set on either side of the flowers.
I think the only mistake I made whilst working on this video, it was one of my first time lapse attempts, was to stitch the pictures with 30fps, as it makes the video a tiny bit jumpy. I have to remember to re-assemble this one again with the new software I got – simply called Time Lapse, bought for £2 from the app store. I just have to copy all the RAW files from my backup drive back onto my brand new MacBook Pro and try one more time. I’ve learned a bit about video editing over the last year so I think I could do a better job this time.
Check it out soon.
Regards
M