Time-Lapse Photography - Frame-by-Frame Stop Motion: The Guide to Non-Traditional Animation Techniques - page 56

'Diving Board' of Half Dome in Yosemite Valley, where we wanted to pay
homage to Ansel Adams's 'Black Monolith' shot. We found the exact time
of the terminator shadow sweeping across the face in his shot by writing
a script to download time-lapse frames of a webcam of Half Dome,
studying it over many months and determining when the best time of
year and day would be to shoot. Of course our work is dwarfed by Ansel's,
but it was an interesting and fun process.”
A wonderful tool can help you plan the path of the sun when you are
scouting out a potential time-lapse location: an iPhone application called
Sun Seeker . It shows you the path of the sun with a superimposed line over
any live camera view from your iPhone. It calculates the path from day to
night any time of the year, so you can plan ahead knowing where the sun
will be if you scout a location months in advance.
When you choose a subject for time-lapse filming, think about the
environments that you go through every day. These are the environments you
understand from constant observation and might make the best subjects. You
will know where you want to set the camera, what occurs during any period
of time, and where any movement is concentrated. It is important to have
dramatic transformation in the environment or find an action that is too slow to
perceive. The dramatic transformation makes for an interesting sequence, and
the slow action or transformation sped up with time-lapse film is fascinating to
see and potentially revealing from an observational point of view.
Contrast
When filming a piece of time-lapse photography, it is helpful to show contrast
within the frame. This use of contrast makes any compositional frame
interesting, but it is critical for time-lapse work. Since time-lapse photography
speeds actions up, the overall frame becomes highly active. If no stationary
elements are in the frame to help set off the action, then the action becomes
a blur of activity and your audience loses focus. This kind of contrast can be
easily achieved by careful compositional design. If you are shooting people
outdoors in a city, then it is important to place some stationary buildings within
the frame. The people, cars, and shadows from the moving sun or artificial light
move around the solid immobile building and the eye of the viewer can focus
on the activity and rest on the stationary elements. It is important to know
how the shadows and key source of light shift or whether you might get a light
flare. All this adds to the active frame, so making sure there are some stationary
elements helps as a stable visual reference in a highly active frame.
In any moving image, the active element in the image usually draws
our eye. If we view a still frame and suddenly an eye blinks or plane jets
across the composition, then that is what we look at. Time-lapse film is no