Yesterday I thought, enough with work, let’s go photographing! But the questions were: what? how? After a bit of sitting around I remembered the tutorial from gwegner.de (by the way, a really good site for tutorials and information) for hyper lapses. This video is in German, but here is also a nice one in English from digitalrev.com.

Basically, with every picture you move with the camera along an imaginary line and take a picture while aiming at the same spot on every picture. As described in the videos, you should use marks are already present, like stones on the ground or just use your step span. In any case this will produce a bit shaky footage, but this can be corrected in after effect. If you shoot in the night, and the are no clouds or stars visible, like in my video, the interval between the pictures is not important. But if you have something in the screen with a steady movement, like clouds, then use a intervalometer. In this video there is a very good description of that. Anyway, in my case i was just going a step forward, point, shoot, step forward, point, shoot…. 250 times. And done. The camera settings were 3.2 s exposure, f/4.5, ISO 100.

After that you have your footage, but this is really shaky. It is impossible to align the camera and the rest completely! But for this there is Adobe After Effects, if you have money, or Deshaker for Virtual Dub, if you don’t have money or just like Open-Source. In any case, the result looks really nice. In post processing I gave to the footage a little bit of a unnatural look, so it looks like rendered, but it is actually taken with a camera in 2 hours and another 2 hours for post processing.

In this video is also stated, that u don’t need fancy equipment like tripod, intervalometer and chalk marks on the ground for 1 km. It’s worth taking a look.