A summer flair of hot air

During January’s dark winter days, summer isn’t more than a distant memory. But looking through photos from 2011 I found this really nice summer moment from August.

Hot air balloons were taking off from Gärdet and the late summer sun was slowly setting. I abruptly left the dinner table, grabbed my gear and ran out. With the camera mounted on a tripod I shot about 1200 photos from two different locations.

Here it is… a short but sweet time lapsed summer memory (also available in HD).

And this is how I created the time lapse:

  1. Take photos
    Lot’s of them.Then take even more.
    I took one shot every three seconds for about an hour. So make sure you have a tripod and an interval remote control (or an interval function on your camera). Preferably you should also set the camera on manual mode since you don’t want the exposure to change in between photos (that can produce a lot of flicker in the resulting video).
  2. Enhance photos
    I wanted to correct the white balance and tweak the exposure and highlights of my photos. Depending on how you compose the final video, you could do color correction etc in your video tool. This time I decided to do it using iPhoto. Adjusting colors in iPhoto is normally a breeze. But when you want to do it on 1200 photos it’s another ball game. Luckily I found a good tool for the task; iPhoto Batch Enhancer. It will automatically apply an adjustment profile to as many photos as you like.
  3. Create time lapse
    QuickTime 7 has a nifty feature called “Add Image Sequence”. Unfortunately that feature is not available in the latest QuickTime version. Instead I decided to use Final Cut Express. When creating a time lapse you want to play back all your photos faster than “real time”. I shot one photo every three seconds back in August and now I decided to use 30 photos per second (30 fps) to create about 40 seconds worth of video.
  4. Add music and effects
    There is really not much going on in the time lapse. Even if 40 seconds seems like a short period of time I was afraid viewers might loose interest before reaching the end. So in order to make things a bit more interesting I added music and a slow zoom effect.
  5. Export, upload, publish… and done!

Check out this tutorial for a more extensive guide on how to make time lapses.

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