This page covers notes on time-lapse photography. There are twi main aspects to time-lapse photography: the hardware, and the software.

Hardware - cameras, wiring, instrumentation, weatherproofing, devices, gadgetry, motors, etc.
Software - capturing images, firmware, storage, networking, wireless communication, control systems

Hardware

Kinds of cameras you can use (for example):

Raspberry pi camera
Big fancy cameras

Software

The software used with timelapse photography may have several goals:

Use drivers to communicate with the camera hardware using whatever processor type (e.g., Raspberry Pi, Arduino, computer) to be able to capture images
Use drivers to control motors to adjust angles
Capture an image from the camera (resulting in a JPG file)
Run a sequential timing loop to obtain a sequence of images (e.g., a Python script)
Process the images, modify colors or apply filters, and turn them into a movie

Generally these can be broken down into:

Firmware (software to talk to hardware at a low level, for camera or camera-related hardware)
Photography (software to actually obtain photographs)
Post-Processing (software to modify the obtained photographs and stitch them together)

Firmware

On the Raspberry Pi, the firmware end is taken care of by a Python library called picamera - this utilizes the kernel bindings available on Raspberry Pi machines to obtain images from the camera. See the following pages for more notes:

The short version of the above pages:

Use Raspbian Linux, not Kali Linux, if you're using a Raspberry Pi
Install the Raspberry Pi camera libraries
Ensure the hardware is all connected properly and that everything is seated snugly (particularly the yellow tab on the front of the camera)

Photography

To do a basic timelapse and capture photographs every few seconds, you can start with this stock script:

lapse.py

import picamera
from datetime import datetime
import time
import os

camera = picamera.PiCamera()

lapse_dir = datetime.strftime(datetime.now(),"timelapse_%Y%m%d-%H%M%S")
os.system('mkdir '+lapse_dir)

while True:

    prefix = datetime.strftime(datetime.now(),"%Y%m%d-%H%M%S")
    filename = lapse_dir+"/"+prefix+".jpg"

    camera.capture(filename)
    print "Saving photo to %s"%(filename)

    time.sleep(2)

Processing and Post-Processing Photos

See the Timelapse/Processing page for a detailed set of notes on the post-processing procedure. The basic steps for post-processing images into time-lapse videos are:

Obtain and wrangle a large number of sequentially numbered jpeg files (xargs)
Figure out what effects to apply - single jpeg file (lightroom)
Apply desired effects en-masse - all jpeg files (lightroom)
Turn mass of jpeg files into video (ffmpeg).

Flags

Timelapse

From charlesreid1

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