A quick walk up St. Giles Hill this morning as the air was clear. Three shots to brighten my day. If you look carefully at the first photo you can see the statue of King Alfred the Unready. He was a famous Saxon King, who launched a contemporary version of The Great British Bake-Off. Unfortunately he was distracted by Nigella Lawson and the cakes burned. He was livid and shouted: It’s not fair. I wasn’t ready. Thereafter he was always known as Alfred the Unready. Some refer to him as Alfred the Grate as the burnt remnants of his Victoria sponge ended up just there. In the grate. He is often confused with his crossing-dressing sister, the socialist leaning Red Ethel. I hope this insight into English history is useful.
A recent discovery was that my Fujifilm X-T1 has a built in Timelapse function. I set the camera up on the roof today and decided I would start with something very basic. I took an image every 10 seconds, 120 frames giving me a magnificent 5 seconds of video. All I wanted to do was see if it worked.
The intervalometer is easy to access. It is on the 2nd shooting menu, 2nd item down. You can set the interval in hours, minutes and seconds up to a full 24 hours and down to 1 second. You can shoot up to 999 frames. I noted that each frame in RAW was 32mb and my Fine jpegs were 3.87mb. The inability significantly to process the jpegs is probably too big a trade-off for serious work. Shooting RAW you need a large capacity card and a lot of patience but it is worth it! I used a 23mm prime lens set to F11, manual focus and ISO and shutter speed also set manually. It is recommended to turn off OIS if you are using an image stabilized lens. I used a Gitzo tripod and my Really Right Stuff 55 ballhead. Rock solid.
I found a video on You Tube explaining what to do. It is remarkably easy. I think I made a few schoolboy errors. The interval was quite long so the output isn’t really smooth. I shot in RAW so the files take up masses of HD. I think the jpeg format of the Fuji is more than good enough if the light is constant. I probably exported at too slow a speed at 24fps (frames per second). I could go to 30fps.
Then I discovered that basic WP.com doesn’t allow me to upload an MP.4 file so I had to upload to You Tube and hope it embeds or links ok. And here is hopefully the end result.
I am going to try again over a longer timeframe. I was worried this morning about rain so I covered the camera and lens with a ziploc bag. I thought the camera felt quite hot at the end. I don’t know if that was caused by the ambient temperature, the camera working hard or the bag cover. I’m not claiming any merit in this but I am sure it has a lot more potential with practice.
Anybody who has done timelapse and can offer tips then I’d love to hear from you. Thanks.
Addendum
I shot a longer version with 3 second intervals, 415 frames and play speed of 29.97fps. This looks rather better even though these are only jpegs! I was fortunate that the light stayed reasonably constant. Had it not then the lack of RAW would have put me in a difficult position.
All downhill from here 