What is Time-Lapse Photography?

Time-lapses allow you to compress the beauty of hours, days even years of work into seconds of footage and there are numerous ways you can get started with this style of photography.

What About Equipment?

In the most simple form, you can simply connect a timer to your camera and set it to the intervals you want and it’ll run until you stop it. However, if you’re looking at something a bit more robust, something that’s compact and built for the one use of time-lapse, then you’ll probably be interested in the Brinno TLC200 Pro. Complete with an interchangeable focusing lens, 4AA batteries and an SD media card, this nifty bit of kit is ready to use straight out of the box.

In this blog, we’ll offer you a step by step guide that anyone can understand, allowing you to get the most of your scenery.

So, Let’s Get Set Up…

The two most important factors to getting the right time-lapse is getting the right timing, this includes fps and timings of how often the Brinno will need to capture an image.

FPS – Frames per second stands for how long you will be filming for. If you’re doing a short film, you’d want 5/10 frames per second. If you’re doing a longer build, over weeks or months then you’d be inclined to go for around 30 frames per second.

You do this by clicking menu, scrolling using the ‘time’ or ‘menu’ buttons as forward and back to settings, click ok, then scroll to time lapse frame rate. Choose one of the pre made selections.

Next, you’ll need to think about how much action is happening in your time-lapse. For example, if you’re filming the sky, it can move every second. So if you’re capturing a sunset, you may want to set the intervals to 1-10s.

If you’re looking at capturing a longer process, such as a construction of a building, you can increase the intervals to one every 10 minutes, every hour, or customise it to however long you want. To do this simply click the time button, now using the ‘time’ or ‘menu’ buttons as forward and back, click through to find the best time or make a custom one.

You just need to keep in mind that to make the time-lapse flow, each change/ all progress will need to be snapped. Think in your mind how long does each stage take? Each task? Frame your time intervals around your answer to these.

You can also set when the camera turns on and off – this is ideal for longer processes as you don’t want to touch the camera once it’s set! If you move it even slightly, it’ll mess up the full video. So if you go into menu, when on the menu tab, use the time button to click next and the menu button to go back. Go to settings, click ok, then scroll to timer, click ok, press menu to go from exit to the timer, then when on it, press ok to set.

Set the time period you’ll be on site from i.e 8:00am – 18:00pm. The camera will only turn on and snap pictures during this timeframe so you don’t need to worry about turning it on and off at risk of moving it!

And We’re Off!

After that you’re good to set up, find the perfect angle, plug into a power source (or load up the batteries) and press record. Happy filming!

If you want to have fun, have ever been curious about time lapse, or actually have clients who need to see a long term event take place in a matter of minutes, the TLC200 Pro is a worthwhile investment.