PhotosbyKev

Timelapse photography using a Merlin/Orion motorised programmable pan/tilt head as a mount for a Canon 7D camera and a Canon 10-22mm lens, a few test results and a final time lapse sequence are shown below.

Cemaes Bay Timelapse – Final

One thousand nine hundred and fifty 0.3 second exposures taken every 4 seconds for over 2 hours. The camera is mounted on a motorised pan/tilt head running at x1 sideral rate (15 degrees/hour).

The camera was connected to a laptop running DSLR Remote Pro which controlled the camera and downloaded the photographs to the hard drive. After 1,950 exposures the camera battery was only down to 40% capacity.

For the final sequence a 2 stop graduated Neutral Density filter and polarising filter was used.

The original is in HDTV1080i (1920×1080)

Cemaes Bay Timelapse – Final from Kevin Lewis on Vimeo.

1 hour 40 minutes  of shooting compressed to 16 seconds to make a timelapse video of the tide receding from the Cemaes bay harbour.

480 separate images were taken on a Canon 7D, 0.5 second @ f22 iso 100 at 12 second intervals. The camera was mounted on a programmable motorised Merlin pan/tilt head and a Nokia N800 running Papywizard software was used to remotely control the camera and the head using bluetooth.

Using this control method means that the pan/tilt head is paused and stabilised before each image is exposed.

A 3 stop ND filter was used to get the longer shutter speed and a 2 stop graduated ND filter was used to balance the sky and foreground.

Uploaded to youtube as a HD 1080 video

The second test (taken the following day)

In this test the Merlin pan/tilt head was constantly rotating at x8 sideral rate (120 degrees/hour) and the camera was being fired by an intervalometer at 5 second intervals to produce 680 images in approximately one hour, the camera setting were the same for this test i.e 0.5 seconds @ f22 iso 100. The same processing was used to produce the video.

Uploaded to youtube as a HD 1080 video