What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you think of time-lapse videos? Watching a flower bloom in Spring or the sky go through entire palettes of colour? As magical as these videos are, you still wonder why everyone using time-lapse is limiting themselves to flowers and skies.
Time-lapse videos are a great way to capture the world in action. Time-lapse videos can photograph subjects over time and present them in great detail through a brief sequence of stills.
With time-lapse, a photographer can explore another dimension of film with the ability to stop time. So why don’t they test its limits?
If that sounds like fun – then here are some ideas to switch things up.
1. Explore angles
As a time-lapse photographer, the only way to stand out from the competition and truly bring more valuable content to the world is to see things from perspectives that others cannot. Changing angles and finding interesting shots can make your audience feel differently about the subject as well.
As building constructions are a common subject for time-lapse videos, imagine shooting this from the bottom of the building instead of laterally, you can capture the rise of the building as well as the cloud movements.
2. Drone time lapse
If you’re looking to shoot a time-lapse video of a massive subject that can be noticed from the sky, drone photography can be an interesting choice. For example, aerial time-lapse videos of big city traffic can be quite eye-catching.
Fly your drone on GPS mode so that the images are stable and there aren’t any significant movements in its positioning. Ensure you follow your local regulations of drone flying. You don’t want to be creating ground-breaking time-lapse videos while breaking the law.
3. Tilt-shift
Tilt-shift is a great way to capture aesthetic shots of a landscape. This ‘miniature’ technique of time-lapse videos uses tilt-shift lenses that place the focus on the scene and blurs everything around it.
Tilt-shift miniature style photos are pictures of real-life scenes that are manipulated to look like model photographs. The trickiest part of tilt-shift time-lapse videos is getting the right field of view. Then you can transform your regular video to tilt-shift on video editing software.
4. Use a mirror
Once you’ve got your camera set up and focused on your subject, hold a mirror above or below the lens to create a symmetrical image of the scene. Using this mirror technique you can add an additional element of captivation to your time-lapse videos.
As interesting as this technique seems, don’t just prop up mirrors for every time-lapse shoot. Think carefully about your scene and how you’d like your audience to perceive it, and use mirrors if it seems like a relevant technique.
5. Hyperlapse
Hyperlapse is an awesome development in time-lapse videography where you move the camera between shots, but maintain constant focus on one particular element within the frame. It’s very important to be able to position the camera consistently between shots.
Unfortunately, hyper-lapse photographers need wide and open spaces to shoot as they have to move around a lot without making it seem like a major difference. So they are often limited to what they can shoot.
If you’re nervous about trying out time-lapse, but you’ve fixed on a subject, try out our innovative ideas to create videos that can fascinate your audience. Now it’s up to you to go out there and create some amazing time-lapse videos.
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