Time lapse photography with camera movement - bondage tie

This post follows on from a post a couple of days ago stating my friend Taner and I were planning to do some Time Lapse Photography which would also include camera movement using the subject as a bondage tie. We spent most of yesterday working on this and I’ve posted a video of the results below. If you’re not familiar with time lapse photography it involves taking a series of still images and then using software to play them back in sequence in quick succession to create a movie, very similar to those old flick books, where’d you’d flick through the pages to see the animation. This session was a practise and experimentation session before we used an actual model for the final film. After about 6 variations on our set-up we managed to come up with an output that we are both very happy with, we’d appreciate your comments and any thoughts too.

Duration, Speed and Intervals

Through trial and error we came up with camera settings that worked for us which I’ve detailed below. To make the finished movie more interesting we wanted to include some camera movement during the sequence. Camera movement was achieved by having the camera mounted onto a motorised slider which in turn was mounted onto a glide track. Below you can see the motor and the silver slider on to which the camera was mounted, the slider was pulled along by fishing line wound on the pulley which is missing from this image. The motor rotates very slowly and pulls the slider along the glide track slowly and most importantly very smoothly; a gliding motion helps to iron-out any jerky movements when the film is played back. Taner built the motorised glide track which performed faultlessly.

Motorised glide track built by Taner

The speed of the camera movement needs to be controlled so this was one variable we had to get right. The second variable was the interval in seconds between each shot. Having too longer gap between shots causes jerky movement when played back as there aren’t enough individual images to give a smooth motion. Conversely having too many shots means it takes longer to render in the computer to create the finished movie file. In the end we settled for 1 second between each shot. We started our tests at 4 second intervals but that was just too longer gap between each shot and resulted in very jerky movement between frames. Another variable is the playback frame rate of the finished video, we agreed to set ours at 24 FPS (Frames Per Second) which is the same a normal cinema films. Yet another variable is the shutter speed on the cameras, setting this too fast means each image is sharp which perhaps sounds ideal, however when you blend them together into a sequence it again produces jerky motion. Far better to have a slower shutter speed which has some motion blur allowing each frame to blend better into the next one when they are run as a sequence. Below are two frames from the final film showing the motion blur between consecutive frames on my right arm.

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Camera Settings

Time Lapse photography has a major impact on shortening the service life of the shutter mechanism of the camera, for this reason Taner and I used our old backup cameras. The final piece of video which is 1 minute long is made up from 1,000 frames, as we ran two camera positions this meant 2,000 frames in total. With all the practise runs and experimentation we both must have shot about 7,000 plus frames on each camera. With a shutter service life of around 200,000 plus on the D2x that’s probably not that bad, but on a D550 ii’s about half that at 100,000. So you can see if you’re frequently shooting long time lapse sequences you’re soon going to hit that 100,000 or 200,000 threshold. I don’t recommend using your brand new top of the range camera as you’ll soon wear it out.

Nikon D2x and Canon D550