A Guide To Time-Lapse Photography

You might have seen a TV program where an important part, like a player scoring a goal is replayed but slowed down to make the viewers better comprehend an act that could have been over in a fraction of a second.

- Ashok Kandimalla

This as you may recall is called slow-motion or slo-mo in short. Slo-mo is also used extensively in event photography to make the viewers enjoy a critical moment like blowing out candles on a cake – for a longer time. Slo-mo stretches time, that is, it shows an event for a longer time than what had occurred really.

What about the opposite of this? That is, you can take an event that takes a long time but play it back in a very short duration. This will make all the events appear to the viewer as if they were happening very rapidly. A good example of this is to show pedestrians moving very fast or clouds moving quickly. This is called Time-Lapse Photography. Contrary to slo-mo, it compresses time. In other words, it shows viewers an event that has occurred for a longer duration in a shorter time. Thus, if you take an event for 30 minutes and replay it in 1 minute, then you would have compressed the time 30 times!

A time-lapse video (also called a timelapse movie by some) is composed of several still images that are photographed at regular intervals over a duration of time. All the images thus captured are joined and played back as a single file which is the time-lapse video. How to create this in your camera is the subject of this article. We will also see, the equipment needed and the parameters you need to set (on your camera) for making time-lapse sequences. There is also one more related term called hyper-lapse. This is similar to time-lapse but here the camera is also moved while the recording is in progress. We will not be dealing with it in this article.