I posted a video by Luke Shepard a few months ago featuring Paris at night. I’ve finally gotten around to posting a response to that video. This video was made with my old PowerShot so the quality isn’t great and I haven’t gotten down the technique well enough for a tutorial, but I think it offers a neat new way to make time-lapse videos.
I made the video by taking photographs on a tripod and focusing on a single point to keep it in the same place. I’d move the tripod a few inches, manually snap a photo, and then move it again. I then lined up the shots in VirtualDub using a free deshaker filter. I’ll post a deshaker filter tutorial sometime soon.
The first shot is coming out of a tunnel at the Conservatory of Flowers in Golden Gate Park. I tried to line up the finial at the top of the building as my focus point.
The next shot was made by walking away from the Francis Scott Key statue. I really like how this turned out. The clouds look good and the pan-out gives a sense of scale.
The fountain was the hardest to line up. VirtualDub couldn’t align the images because the background and lighting changed so drastically. I used Photoshop instead and lined up each photo with the one before it. Even this slow method didn’t give the result I wanted. I focused on lining up the lion’s head but the rest of the fountain wobbles a bit in the video.
Notre Dame? Oh yeah, we’ve got one of those. This shot was of Grace Cathedral on Nob Hill in San Francisco. There weren’t any clouds the day I went, so I cut this shot pretty short. If I had a wider lens, I would have included traffic and pedestrians to give a sense of time passing.
The final shot is of the Golden Gate Bridge. I used a polarizing filter, which really brought out the colors. It almost looks like HDR. I also like the lenticular clouds over the Marin Headlands.
