Time Lapse Photography With The N82: Watch A Plant Grow

This has got to be one of the coolest N82 related emails I've gotten, not to mention one of the most creative things I've seen done with the Nokia N82. Time Lapse Photography is never something I've thought of to try with my N82 or any Nseries device for that matter.

Ming Dao Ting emailed me the other day sharing a video he made of a seed germinating into a plant. He was inspired by an article over at the Finest Fones blog and also Rachmaninoff's piano concerto no.2 in C minor, 2nd movement.

Before I say more, I'm going to hand off the rest of the post to him. If you have any questions for Ming he will be answering them in the comments after the article.


The Creation of Give Growth By Ming Dao Ting

Time lapse videography has always fascinated me; I mean, 3D animation is pretty cool, but messing with the 4th dimension (time) is way cooler. Watching nature at unnatural speeds is like witnessing pure magic. And thanks to the Nokia N82 (and any S60 device with a camera), it’s now completely within our reach. So let’s make some magic.

Inspired by an article by Finest Phones and the 2nd movement of Rachmaninoff’s piano concerto in C minor (long story), I decided to put my N82 to the test and create a time lapse video of a seed germinating. This was the result:

Time lapse videos can be made by taking a very long video and speeding it up, or (more commonly) by taking photos at regular intervals and making a video out of them. Here’s how I made mine.

1. Preparing the camera: The key is to set your camera to sequence mode, and pick a defined time interval in between photos. As my video was of a seed germinating over 10 days, I used 10 min intervals, but you might use 10sec or 30 sec intervals if you were filming something ‘quicker’ like a sunset, for example. Because I wasn’t planning to make a crazily high res video, I reduced my image capture quality to 3M (2M is fine too), making sure I had enough memory for tons of photos. Flash was turned off, and I left colour balance at auto.

2. Preparing the set-up: The key here is to make sure your phone doesn’t move over the recording period. You can use any suitable tripod, or be cheap innovative like me and chuck your phone in a crystal case and sticky tape it firmly to a surface. Whatever works, really. I also anchored every other element in the video to prevent any unnecessary moving/shaking. I then positioned the camera in front of the seed, taking into account where it would end up once grown. Because I expected the recording phase to span over a week, I had the phone charger plugged in for the entire duration.

3. Capturing the footage: Hit the capture button on the phone, and be patient (it’s the hardest part). I set the camera’s shutter sound to “on” so that I could hear whenever a photo was taken. If you wanna check on the progress, tapping the capture button lightly will bring up the last picture taken, with a little countdown timer at the bottom of the screen indicating when the next picture will be shot.

4. Creating the video: When I had gathered enough footage, I imported all the photos (1400 of them, over 10 days) into my computer, and inserted them into my video editing software of choice, Adobe Premiere Elements. I then created a 25 frame/sec video with each photo having a 1 frame time length, threw in backing music, and voila, a timelapse video was born! If you’d like a freeware option, MakeAVI is a simple application that converts images into AVI (video) files and will basically do the same job. I prefer Premiere Elements it gives me more options to tweak contrast and speed and stuff like that. And put in fancy titles.

And that’s pretty much all there is to it. The hardest part by far is the waiting, especially because it meant I had to go for 10 days without my N82 :( However the sacrifice was well worth it, and I must say I’ve come to appreciate plants a lot more now. Of course timelapse videography doesn’t always need to span weeks; here are some ideas (off the top of my head) that you could try capturing:

- Weather (sunrise, sunset, clouds rolling, storm brewing)

- Nature (flowers blooming, fruit rotting, fingernails growing - maybe not that last one)

- Traffic (busy intersections, peak hour, attaching the camera to your dashboard on a long trip)

- Events (setting up concert venues, crowds filling in seats, your 21st celebration)

- In general, anything slow that would look cool sped up (like a candle burning, ice melting, your pet snail, painting an artwork, or even cleaning the house)


So what are you waiting for? Grab your N82 and go make magic!

Thanks Ming. Be sure to check out his website at mingdao.blogspot.com