Time lapse photography is often extremely exciting to watch. We are able to see the things we encounter over a period of hours in seconds. For three excellent examples of Time lapse photography I highly recommend the Bathtub Tilt-shift series. Here are parts one, two and, three. I can't guarantee your time lapse will be as great as those, but this tutorial should help you get started.

Step One - Gathering Resources

To do time lapse you'll need a few things. The first should be obvious - a camera. I'll be using a Nikon D40 which retails for just under $500. In most inexpensive DSLRs you would be hard pressed to find a built in time lapse mode. No worries, there are a few solutions which will allow you to still create this effect.

The first is free software called sofortbild, created by Stefan Hafeneger. This program is for Mac OS X and Nikon camera's only. There are other solutions for Windows and other Camera manufactures as well:

- Canon (Win)
- Most DSLRs (Win)
- Most DSLRs (Mac / Win)

The downside to using software is that you need a) a laptop, and b) the laptop needs to be with you an on during the whole process. The solution to this problem is the Pclix LT which is an "affordable, portable, time-lapse solution." At $140, it's a bit pricy, but well worth it if you plan on doing this multiple times. For now, we'll suffer through the software.

Finally, you will need a tripod to keep your camera still during the process of taking these photos. If you don't have a tripod you can rest your camera on a solid surface, but a tripod is highly recommended.

Step Two - Setup

I'll be using Sofortbild, but the process should be transferable between different software. Once you've opened Sofortbild, plug in your Nikon camera using a miniUSB cable. The inactive buttons will now become available.

Select the Interval Shooting button which is located beside the BKT button. A new dialogue box will appear prompting you to select the time in between shots. You can take pictures as quick as one second apart.

Now you're ready to get shooting. Just press the camera icon to start the time lapse.

Step Three - Compiling the Images

Once you've taken a few hundred photos (if not a thousand), you're probably ready to create the time lapse. I will be using Quick Time Pro to import the images because it's extremely fast and has incredible export features. You can use another program, but Quick Time Pro is worth investing a few dollars in not only for time lapse, but many other editing features.

Before we get started with Quick Time, I recommend reducing the sizes of your images using either Adobe Photoshop batch processing or Automator. The resolution of these images in their original form will be way too large so you will want to reduce their size by at least 50%. This will also decrease the export time drastically.

In Quick Time select File > Open Image Sequence.... From there, select the first image of your file sequence. If your images are grayed out like mine are, you must convert them into another format other than RAW. High quality .jpg or .png will work fine.

Next you need to select a frame rate. I recommend either 24 FPS or 30 FPS.

After the images have opened up into Quick Time Pro, all you need to do is export (File > Export). You can leave the settings at their default, or go in and change them as you wish. Then press ok and the export will begin.

And that's it. After the export has completed, it will open in Quick Time and you're ready to host it online. Here's the final result and thanks for reading:

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