I started off in the beautiful Louvre courtyard in Paris, focusing on the Pyramid, and I hoped for some engaging clouds passing. One must remember when framing a shot that video does not have the same picture ratio as a standard still image. My Nikon D500 produces a native 3x2 image format, being three parts wide, to two parts tall. Video, on the other hand, works in a widescreen ratio, which is, as the name suggests, is wider than a standard image. I changed the shooting mode on the back of the camera from live view photo to live view video mode, and by doing that, it produced black bars at the top and the bottom of the image, so I knew where the edge of my 16x9 image lay.

Although 25 frames per second is the standard in European and Commonwealth countries, you will notice that there are also 24 or 30 frames per second options, these are standard in North America... because they just have to be a little bit different. In the end, it only equates to a minute difference, but when shooting for minutes and hours, it will make a larger difference in the overall length of the film. Lastly, I needed to think about how to physically make the timelapse video. There are two main ways, an easy way, and a not so easy way. If you have a camera such as the Nikon D500 like me, then you will have an inbuilt time-lapse feature in the video menu. It will work through all of the complex equations, put all the photos back to back and spit out an MOV movie file. If your camera doesn't have a time-lapse option, it isn't a huge problem. You just need to the series of photos at a constant interval, then put them into an external editing software to make those still images into a video. If you are shooting this way, I would not recommend shooting in raw. When you are taking hundreds of thousands of photographs, raw images will unnecessarily consume a lot of card space. We don't even need to shoot in a large Jpeg image either. HD video is 1920 pixels by 1080 pixels, so most "small" Jpeg images will be far greater than that, meaning there will be zero quality loss when downsampling.

Before I invest the full 20 min for the time-lapse, I want to make a quick test of 1 min. This way I can quickly see if there are any mistakes, such as exposure, focus, framing or anything else. A common mistake is to leave your focus set to automatic. The result might mean the automatic focusing system will try to find the focus each time before shooting. This will create breathing problem if the lens doesn't focus at the exact same place each time, and deliver us an uneven final product. To avoid this, first, set your focus and then turn your camera's focus off. I do this by switching mine into manual focus. Once I was satisfied with my test, I reset my time to 20 minutes and pressed start.