Impressive Time Lapse HDR Video from Sony A700

I am always inspired (and humbled) as a photographer as I cull through the Photography Bay Flickr Group each week. As I was checking out some of the additions to the group this week, something stood out a little more than usual.

That something was Flickr user andyathlon‘s additions to the Photography Bay Group Pool, which included the HDR time lapse videos below.

To capture each of these videos, Andy used a Sony A700 and captured several hundred images that he batch processed in Photomatix for the HDR effect.  You can see his full workflow description below.

Here’s Andy’s description of his shooting and post-production for these cool time lapse HDR videos:

“The main aim of my stop animations was to capture movement in a shot that cannot be seen.

I shoot with a Sony a700 and a Sigma 10-20 to capture the most out of a scene. I combine this with a B&W ND10 which allows me to create a long exposure during the day.

I start by first taking a shot to compose the scene and balance the exposure I have found that this can vary heavily under the light conditions.

I aim to keep the exposure at around 1.5-3 seconds, this allows me to capture movement of people but not the detail. I do this using a Hahnel Giga T pro wireless remote. With this remote I can set exposures, delays and intervals.

Once I have the shot set up and balanced the exposure, I set the camera in Jpeg so I can store thousands of shots instead of hundreds then set my remote firing and wait……. and wait…….

Typically I am to get at least 700 shots, this will allow me to create a 70 second video if I use 10 frames per second in quicktime. Some of my longer videos have over 3-4 thousand shots which resulted in massive file sizes and huge processing times.

Once I have the shots it’s time to process. I use Photomatix batch processing to combine 2 shots to create the HDR, in theory this shouldn’t work as they are the same exposure and offer no difference. I alter the HDR settings and run a test shot through to see what it looks like, changing settings to alter the strength and colour of the HDR. Once I’m happy I let it run with my pc it can take up to 30mins but can vary massively depending on size and number of shots.

Finally once all the shots are processed I import them into quicktime using open image sequence, and then export the video with HD quality settings.”

A big thanks to Andy for sharing this process with us, and being a part of the Photography Bay community.  You can head on over to his Flickr Photostream to check out more of his work.