In the Field: Shooting Waterfalls with Motion
Lesson 12 from: Capturing Change Timelapse WorkshopColin Delehanty
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In the Field: Shooting Waterfalls with Motion
Lesson 12 from: Capturing Change Timelapse WorkshopColin Delehanty
Lesson Info
12. In the Field: Shooting Waterfalls with Motion
Lessons
M0 - Introduction
1An Introduction from Alex
01:25 2Coffee Q&A with Alex
09:26 3Introduction to the Workshop
01:51M1 - Timelapse Basics
4What is Timelapse
04:48 5Camera Gear
06:05 6Timelapse Gear
06:49Support Gear
03:14 8Field Essentials
03:46 9Key Takeaways
01:01M2 - Shooting
10Motion Timelapse
11:11 11In the Field: Manual Exposure Ramping
06:31 12In the Field: Shooting Waterfalls with Motion
07:55 13Astro-Timelapse
08:47 14In the Field: Shooting Moonrise
09:07 15How To Do A Lens Twist
03:17 16Day-to-Night Timelapse
06:42 17Day-to-Night at Tunnel View
05:01M3 - Editing
18Import Structure
10:37 19Basic Timelapse Editing
21:40 20Advanced Timelapse Editing
19:58 21Outro to Editing
00:56M4 - Developing and Planning a Project
22Seeing Life In Timelapse
03:57 23Finding Purpose In Your Timelapse
01:43 24Mood Boards & Shot Lists
08:39 25Production Schedule
02:55M5 - Outro
26Q&A with Alex
20:14Lesson Info
In the Field: Shooting Waterfalls with Motion
(ethereal music) So we got shut down on our original plans. We were gonna capture sunset in Yosemite Valley, but now we're gonna go capture a waterfall because the lighting conditions are still good enough to capture the light reflecting off the waterfall. So we're gonna try and do that using a motion time lapse. Okay. (equipment clattering) All right, so (camera shutter clicks) walking back and forth right now, and it looks kind of silly, but to me it makes sense, because I'm replicating the three foot movement that's possible for us to make with our slider rail. Now, I kind of want to use the slider rail to reveal our subject, which is the falls over there. And I'm using the trees to obscure it, and then peeking around the corner of those trees to bring it into frame. Now, I think that that movement can be possible from this point, but I'm just trying to find the right place to get a good composition that I'm happy with. (bag zipping) (equipment clattering) I think motion's gonna b...
e really good for this shot because if I just lock off a shot that looks straight down the barrel, at Yosemite Falls, I don't really feel like I get much outta that, but if I can reveal the falls by pulling the camera out from behind the trees and, uh, landing on the falls, then I think I have a little bit more flexibility if I were to use that to cut into a project. So right here, we have the Syrp Genie and we're gonna throw this onto the platform right here. That's gonna be moving left to right. When we put that on, we're just gonna snap it into place. We're gonna make sure that doesn't have a red anywhere in that area indicating that it's not locked. So it's locked right now. And then we're gonna take some other equipment. Down here we have the Genie Mini. (device locking in) This goes right onto here. We're gonna line up everything properly. This is the Genie, and it has a built-in motor that's gonna do our pan movement. So it's gonna rotate just like a hockey puck left and right. And then up here we're gonna touch another Genie that has its own motor built into it as well. And that will control our tilt, lifting the camera up and down. (wind blowing) I think that we're gonna use these settings here. The, the waterfall is the focus of our shot. So we wanna use a shallow depth of field and the aperture I'm using to accomplish that is 6.3. F6.3 allows me to keep the aperture open wide enough so that we have that shallow depth field, but also allows us to bring our shutter speed down to one half a second. And by doing that, we're dragging the shutter and we're capturing all the motion that's happening from when the shutter opens to when it closes and what that looks like is it sort of looks like more like a dreamlike sequence where you you see the motion more, it looks more blurry, and it, it also just seems more fluid. It, you can, you can kind of understand the flow of the water a little bit better than if you were to have shorter shutter. And it just, it just looks a little bit better to, to the eye. And so, and we're going to use an ISO of to make sure that we are able to drag our shutter. If we use a higher ISO, then we wouldn't be able to do that. Serve some coffee. Collin, we got you some strength Strength. What's this one? The green one is for Bruny. And then this one's for you. Psh, psh, choo. (Collin laughing) So we have the settings that look good for this shot. And we're just gonna preview to make sure that those are the right settings for the motion we're doing. We wanna look for whether or not this is too quick of a move. And if it's a long enough move. We wanna reveal the falls. We need to make sure that our camera actually moves far enough to the right, to reveal the falls and move away from the trees. So we're gonna do a preview. We're just gonna move the camera at real time. And that will show us what our shot will look like when we compile it in post production. And I'm thinking that is just what we're looking for. So at the, when it gets to the end of this, I'm just gonna hit stop. I'm gonna move the camera back to its starting position, and then we're gonna hit start. (Collin whispering) Yeah, we're losing that light. (men whispering) Okay, so we're rolling now. We've got our shot moving from left to right. And we're gonna reveal the waterfall. Now the movement that we set up, we used a setting that will allow us to get 15 seconds of video. And that's just the right amount of video, I think, for what we're looking for. We don't want to go any less than that for this shot. And in order to get 15 seconds of video, we have to think about the frame rate we're going to be compiling these, these images into and the frame rate we're gonna be using is 24 frame, 24 frames per second. And so if you multiply 24 by you get a number around 337 photos. And the smoothness is determined by the interval we've chosen. We chose an interval of 2.5 seconds and that means the camera is taking a photo. So photo, 2.5 seconds later, another photo. We're just gonna keep an eye on the shot as it's going. We're gonna babysit it, make sure that, you know, this is a high traffic area. We don't want anyone to accidentally kick the tripod. You know, if that happens, it's okay. Those things happen. Be kind to people and have a fun time while you're shooting this time lapse. All right, we just finished our shot and we walked back to the car and packed things up. I'm doing a quick review of our time lapse. I'm gonna scroll through. And as I get towards the end, I see that things get a little dark. So a few takeaways regarding that. Because it got a little dark towards the end of the shot, I probably would've increased my exposure a little bit to compensate for the, the dropping light. The second thing is probably would've given myself a little extra time probably would, instead of 30 minutes to set up, I would've given myself 45 minutes to set up. An extra 15 minutes would've made a big difference and also allowed us to get more of that bright light that was reflecting off the waterfall. Now let's pack up, let's get back to the studio and compile the shot. I'm really excited to see it, what it looks like. This is the most exciting thing about timeouts for me is just actually reviewing the shot after you're compiling it and seeing what you got. Really excited about that. (ethereal music)
Class Materials
Bonus Materials with Purchase
Ratings and Reviews
Ondrej Dvorak
I have seen tons of timelapses, but there is no other timelapse film that touches my soul as much as Project Yosemite 1 I never forget the moment when I saw Project Yosemite for the first time! That moment I knew that that’s what I wanna DO! Colin is the reason that I bought my first DSLR! Thank You Alex for getting together with my hero and make this awesome idea happen!
Bryce Lord
Clear and concise workshop to understand the process of Time-lapse photography Being new to this aspect of photography, I found this workshop informative and directional. If I were to give a critique, it would be regarding equipment choice for the entry level bridging to pro-level for the introductory student. Otherwise, it lays a nice foundation to build from.
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