Time Lapse Photography by Nige Levanterman, Tuesday 6th February, 2018

Hi Folks,

Last night’s talk was by Nige Levanterman who has an internet following of 100,000 people and it all started by him taking the photograph of a London Bus in the title picture above. The secret is to produce something unique and original,  nobody at that time had produced a picture of a bus done in that style.

Last night Nige talked about Time Lapse photography which has taken off in a big way for him.

Some of the topics that were discussed during the evening

Nige uses two cameras which are both by Canon, one is set up for the Time Lapse photography whilst the other is often used for taking special pictures to add to the Time Lapse film he produces, although I understand the two can be used at the same time to speed up the taking of pictures.  Both the cameras are 50 mega pixels and produce 8k high resolution screen quality and allows Nige to even use a small part of a larger picture.

It apparently needs a 100 pictures just to make a 5 second video, Raw pictures are used by Nige rather than video for their higher quality results. Also the best quality memory cards are used as it takes 4 seconds for a card to read the camera shot. The read  time can be reduced by 2 seconds having a second card working.

In London one often comes across places where tripods are not allowed and in Time Elapse filming it is vital there is no shake of the camera.

There are various devices you can buy to clamp the camera to a fence or barrier to overcome this problem

what can go wrong in Time Lapse photography?

Well Nige said you must avoid movement, check your batteries, one must have manual focus and to make sure there are no camera marks on the lens or sensor as they are impossible to edit out afterwards and will be on every photograph involved.

Nige showed us a Time Lapse film he made requested by a ferry company on the Thames.

There are several useful Apps which tell you where the sun rises / sunsets are going to be and the time they happen in the areas one want to photograph in. Also there is various software to smooth out flicker and changes in the light.

We were then treated to some of the Time Lapse films Nige has produced and then shown a small video of day time turning into night and what was necessary to get it perfect which involved the camera parameter being set to control the ISO as the light changed.

Coffee Time

Nice shirt Brian lol

In the second half we were shown the editing tools Nige uses to produce a film

Where all of the pictures are brought into LRTtimeLapse software (a light room add on)

The pictures are then collated together into a film. These film slots can have breaks to add in extra photographs taken on a separate camera.

Then after using deflicker software we were shown how it smoothed out the pictures for a Time Lapse film

Then we were shown another outstanding video done of ‘Winter Wonderland’ in Hyde Park with its fair ground and all the attractions spinning around which looked stunning.

Then Nige said he wanted a sunset over the London Eye but the film after processing was not that interesting for him as there was only about 30 seconds of video. Remember a 100 pics make 5 seconds of film. So he decided to make a very unusual film using sections of the film split into quadrants  where each quadrant of pictures lit up in different ways and one had to be here to see it.

Nige also did a very big car Time Lapse advert for Volkswagen and he showed us all the set up used to plan it all. Also how he made the Tower bridge gates move up and down in a sequence in the film.

Also Nige is quite interested in taking the Milky Way and there is a App which will show one where the darkest areas are in the world to get the best shots. Lulworth Cove in Devon is one of the darker spots in England for taking sharper and brighter pictures of stars. Nige said if one finds the North Star the all the other stars revolve around it.

Finally Hyper Lapse filming

This is where one takes a shot then moves the camera.

One has to position the camera each time on a set focused spot and keep walking and taking the next shot. We were shown about three examples of this and Nige pointed out in one of them people looking at him are thinking he is mad lol.

I understand Nige runs a practical course in London once a month for those that are interested, his details are on the title picture

An interesting evening for me but a lot of work into producing a film and a lot of gadgets involved to make them perfect.

I spend a week on one photograph trying to improve it for competition and end up with ten different copies of the same picture. I’m not sure I can handle 4500 pictures in one go on my disk lol

Next week is

Informal Critique Evening