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As regular readers of the blog are aware, I’ve toyed around many times with time-lapse videos made with my DSLR cameras. This past weekend in Ottawa, I decided to be a bit more ambitious and make a video with a little variety instead of the static scenes I usually shoot.

The majority of this video was shot in about three hours on the grounds and surroundings of Parliament Hill. Over 4,000 frames garnered me about 90 seconds of footage, which I edited down to 1m25s including intro and outro titles, music, and a few seconds of regular non-time-lapse HD video.

The big swath of fire in the video is known as the Centennial Flame.

Everything was shot on a Nikon D300S with battery grip, set on a Manfrotto tripod. As good as the tripod is, the wind kicked up some fierce gusts that night, which resulted in some video jitter on the longer (200mm) shots.

After tweaking the photos in Lightroom and cropping to 16:9, I pulled each batch of JPEGs into QuickTime Player 7 Pro, which output my working movie files. I used iMovie to glue the whole mess together with movies and titles. I’d never used iMovie for anything more complicated than adding a soundtrack to existing video, but I found the whole process incredibly easy.

Now that I’m a lot more comfortable with the editing process, I have a strong inclination to make one of these vids featuring Toronto… We’ll see.

Music: “Yeah (Pretentious Version)” by LCD Soundsystem

The studio is in Bowmanville, which is a long trek for me, but totally worth it. A couple weeks ago, I shot a familiar face for those of you who follow the blog — Samantha. I’ve only processed one shot from the shoot so far:

The pose and outfit was Sam’s idea. I lit her with an Alien Bees 1600 strobe in a Photoflex softbox, up high to camera right. The background is dark grey seamless paper, lit with a Nikon SB-800 on a tripod. The SB-800′s zoom head was set to about 135mm, for a narrow beam of light across the background, just enough to give Sam some separation.

But I also did another fun time-lapse video:

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The video is composed of 2,290 separate pictures, glued together using QuickTime Pro (version 7, as they’ve stripped this functionality out of the newer versions). I was using my ancient Nikon D70S tethered to a MacBook Pro running Sofortbild. Because the D70S doesn’t have an intervalometer built in, the Sofortbild software is necessary to accomplish pictures at set intervals. Despite setting the intervals to one second, I ended up with photos that were five seconds apart. I suspect this is due to the D70S’s slow buffering, processing, and/or transfer speeds, but I don’t know for sure as I have no real way to test it.

Music: Anger (Rare Force 2 Meg Mix) by Ryuichi Sakamoto.

I’ve posted photos from this shoot before, but now you can glimpse behind the scenes to see how it was done in this time lapse video.

Model: Randall Sutton. Music: “Lovely Allen” by Holy Fuck.

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Time lapse in Montreal, August 2008.