Long-term Time-lapse Photography

Here at time-lapse towers we class any shoot that takes longer than a day a long-term capture. Although we have stood by our cameras on location for more than 24hrs, we tend to favour rigging a self-operating camera so we can grab some rest! Long-term time-lapse photography is both a simple and complicated beast as there’s many options available. As you’ll see from the reel above, multiple disciplines have been used for capturing the shot and although trimmed down and sped up in the edit, the shots range from a single day to over a couple of years in real time capture.

In detail, here is our ‘about’ section of long-term capture.

8K and beyond

We use professional stills cameras and lenses for capturing our shots and most of our stock is 8K resolution minimum allowing us to crop into the action if required or just to capture the finest details. Our capabilities stretch beyond that though if required - from 12K all the way up to 24K using our multi-camera rig as a stereo pair and all housed in a fully sealed housing.

Off or Online

This is location dependant in some rare cases but otherwise you can choose to link into our online portal to view the progress or rewind time to check a specific date on your shoot. This comes in particularly useful if you’re on the other side of the world or your looking to share any progress on the shoot with other colleagues. For any security issues, even though the cameras may not be capturing short intervals, you may find some evidence in there somewhere! What we can also do is control the camera remotely so any changes to intervals or so on can be made. The alternative to the online cameras (and more cost effective) are our offline cameras - reliable work horses that have been used on many shoots over the years.

Long-term intervals

Back when we first started out in 2010 we were limited on shoots due to memory card size. This is not a problem now though as our systems are capable of holding hard drives or SSD’s many terabytes in size so if you did want a one hour time-lapse we’ve got you covered. On that note, although a one hour shot covering many years is someone’s time-lapse dream, it’s not for most people! When we’re going through your plans, we’ll ask you what your desired length of clip will be. Not only does this allow us to work out the interval (total length of shoot divided by how many frames we need to shoot), we’ll also gather slightly more footage than required should any changes have to be made in the edit or just to make the final video longer.

Power

Outdoors, our cameras run on a battery pack and small solar panel. The batteries are high-cycle 44Ah kits that can be flown worldwide and on our longest shoot, have lasted over ten years and still going! If your shoot is indoors we can either power the rigs from a mains supply or pop over and change the battery pack which will last up to a month.

Maintenance

This may be required from time to time which will depend on location of the rig. We’ve experimented with various methods over the years from small windscreen style wipers to nano-coated glass but when it comes to a shoot over many months, the best thing to do is head over to the camera and give the front glass a clean! This isn’t a deal-breaker though as very often a good shower of rain will remove most filth on the outside. We either head over ourselves but for remote locations, we’ll find someone a bit more local to cut down on costs.

Grip

We can attach our rigs to anything as long as it’s stable enough. Our supply of kit ranges from our scaffold towers, masts and for the places we can’t attach the camera due to structure or instability, we can build something bespoke that’s free-standing and immovable without any damage to the locality.

NEW! Long-term Motion-control time-lapse 2023

For the past year, we’ve been testing out our new motion controlled long-term slider and have been lucky enough to do this on a broadcast shoot. It’s still running and we’ll be able to publish our extravagant shoot once it’s been broadcast in 2025. Essentially, it’s a 15m track that only shoots during the day to eliminate all the night which means you lose the ‘disco’ effect switching between night and day whilst on the move. It adds a whole new element to shooting rather than just a static shot and garners more viewing interest!

Seasonal Time-lapse

There’s two methods we use to capture seasonal change; the first is to rig a long-term camera and shoot through the seasons. This method works but will give you the classic flicker seen in any long-term shoot due to the changes in weather on a daily basis. Alternatively, we wait for a decent weather day, set up a shot and precisely take note of how and where it was set up and capture a shot and repeat it over the seasons. Not only does this capture a ‘cleaner’ time-lapse but also allows us to capture more angles in a single session. This method can also be used on any long-term shot but results may vary dependant upon subject matter. For more info on how we capture seasonal timelapse, click here to read our blog post.

For more info on long-term time-lapse photography, contact us here.