Raking leaves is an exercise in futility. This is especially true since our trees still have loads of leaves on them. I’m tempted to just wait until they all fall, then hire someone else to clean them up. that strategy has worked well in the past.
Alas, though, I’m bowing to neighborhood convention, and at least cleaning off the front yard so that the house looks respectable. However, there’s nothing that says that I can’t have fun doing it.
I had thought about this video the last time I cleared the leaves off of our front yard. This would make an excellent time-lapse video. My new Nikon D7000 has an interval timer build into it, so why not put it to use?
I gathered my leaf-clearing tools – leafblower, rake, and tarp. I had these staged in place first, then set up the camera. Using my wide-angle 18mm lens, I tried to position the camera with the best view of the yard. After a couple of test shots, I knew I’d probably have to move the camera part way through the process. That was OK with me. Most of the best time-lapse videos (of which this was not one) include interspersed scenes rather than just one viewpoint.
I set the interval timer on the camera to capture one image every five seconds. One minute would cover 12 shots. At 30 frames per second, 2 hours of shooting time would produce only 48 seconds of video.
I wound up changing the viewpoint two times for a total for three scenes. The final tally was 533 shots, which comes to about an hour and 45 minutes for total leaf cleanup time. Once I had the 533 shots I imported them into iMovie on my Mac.
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For a smooth 24 frames per second I needed each shot to last only 0.04 seconds. Unfortunately, I couldn’t figure out how to set that in iMovie the first time around. I could only use the default 0.1 setting, so my first version was 10 fps. It’s 1 minute 20 seconds long, and is a bit jerky at that frame rate, but here it is…
After reading a couple of online tutorials, I found a way to set the video to 24 fps, but by this time I had already uploaded the first version of the video.
I had viewed another online tutorial that used Adobe Lightroom to create the video. I haven’t been using Lightroom, but decided to buy it and download it.
I imported the images into lightroom and used a third-party preset by Sean McCormack to create the time-lapse video in 24 fps. The new version was only 28 seconds long. This one was also cropped to the proper aspect ration, 16:9.
The Lightroom technique seems to be the best way to go with it. I may use this for future time-lapse projects.
As it turns out, I’m not the first to create time-lapse videos here are a couple of other examples.
…and this one…
It seems that clean-up is not limited to yard work. Here’s a time-lapse of a young lady cleaning up her room…
I like the technique that Photo Gavin uses with Lightroom. I may have to find other ways to use this.