MOON-Lapse

For my experimentation I have made a range of different stop-motion and
time-lapse films. I have based them all in my home town of Eastleigh
so it would give a more personal touch to the end result. As
Eastleigh is a very flat town I have found it hard to get high angle
shots of the whole town but I have however managed to get some
stunning shots of the sky and moon.

I am making my films in two different ways one with a Nikon Coolpix
stills camera and one with a digital Canon video camera. the Still
camera can only take a photography every 30 seconds and for some
things that happen a lot quicker I need more frames per seconds. For
the shots that are done on the camcorder I remove frames, so that it
haves a simluer look to the Nikon stills. I am using a tripod for all
my experiments.

As the moon lately has been the closes to earth that it has ever been
for 18 years I decided to use this and make a time-lapse of the full
moon moving across the sky. For one week I stayed up till 12 and set
the camera up and left it.  On my first go I had to take a
photography every five minutes but found that the moon moved to quick
so it did not create a smooth motion across the sky. I also did one
for every 1 minute the next night and one every 3o seconds the night
after that. The 1 minute one  goes all the way to sun rise but for me
the 30 second one looks the best though the battery ran out before
sun-rise.

I had the camera  take photography at 8 mega pixals so I would get a
good quality image. I used a 4 Gib memory card so I would not run out
of room. My only limitation is the life of the battery as I do not
own a mains lead.

Ones I had the camera all set one I went to
ed as I am always tempted to move it or change the settings which
would ruin the final look of it. One of the main worries I had was
that someone would steal the camera but lucky for me no one did. For
the second night I added a lock to my back gate for safety. 
 

In the morning I uploaded all the 100s of images and coped and rotated
them using the batch setting on Photoshop CS5 to make sure they were
all the same. I then at college added the file will all my stills in
to Final Cut Pro and put all the images on the time-line, changed the
duration to 0.3 seconds per image then exported it as a QuickTime.