Time Lapse photography is where a camera takes a series of images of a subject with a chosen interval of time between each image. The interval of time can be set from anything from less than a second to a day or even more. When the sequence of images are played back the interval time is speeded up so that you can, for example, watch the different stages of a flower opening up or the sun rising and setting over a period of 24 hours.

Nikon’s Rob MacNeice explains: ‘My colleague Dave Robbins and I arrived at the NEC before our stand builders got to work. We chose a D300S because it’s relatively lightweight, durable and has a 10-pin remote terminal. Time lapse photography is achievable on any camera with an intervelometer (D100, D200, D300, D300S, D700, D1 series, D2 series, D3 series) for up to 999 images. For a time lapse with more than 999 images, you need an MC-36 which will connect to any Nikon DSLR with a 10-pin remote terminal. ‘The MC-36 works like a digital timer for the shutter release and lets you take as many continuous images as you need in a given interval. By setting the MC-36 up for one shot every 30 seconds, it could take 2880 shots a day, giving us over 17,000 images for our time-lapse. These fit on one 8GB CF card in small jpeg quality, which is good enough for playback on a computer screen. Nikon Time lapse ‘We went for a three-quarter side view of the stand from around 18 feet up, clamping the camera to a girder using a G-clamp with a Manfrotto ball and socket head. From this distance, the 17-35mm f/2.8 lens set to around 30mm gave good coverage.’ ‘As we knew light levels in the exhibition hall would change drastically throughout the build, we went for aperture priority to ensure consistency in exposure. f/8 gave us enough depth of field while allowing a relatively fast shutter speed, which varied between 1/2sec to 1/100sec throughout the shoot. We kept the ISO at 200 which is the D300S’s optimal setting. There were a variety of light sources in the exhibition hall, including daylight, tungsten and fluorescent, so we chose auto white balance to ensure consistency in colour temperature. The camera coped very well with the constantly changing light.’ ‘We then needed to remove the unwanted frames which were taken at night when there was no activity, and piece the time lapse together. We used Nikon View NX (this comes free with all camera products, or is downloadable from our website) to edit as it lets you very quickly look through thousands of images, rename files and sort them in to new folders.’ ‘Once we had the final selection, we created the time lapse in Quick Time Pro. This is also very easy – you simply choose the folder and the playback speed. For this time lapse, we chose 25 frames per second, so each second on the video is 12.5 minutes– the time lapse is 750 times faster than reality.’

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