Tilt-shift Time-lapse Photography

Photography Tips  •  Time-lapse Photography

With all the amazing time lapse videos that have been making their way to the interwebs lately, you start to wonder if there is even an room for improvement anymore. Then a video like this surfaces and we become awestruck all over again. Meticulously crafted together using over 170,000 still photographs, take a moment and escape to Rio for a Carnaval celebration like no other:

For this production, Keith Loutit teamed up with Jarbas Agnelli to make this nearly six minute long time-lapse. To collect the footage, the two met up in Rio de Janeiro in 2011 for the annual Carnival festivities. The photographs were shot with Nikon D3′s which, Loutit says were equipped with modified enlargers and large format bellows.

A motorized head assisted with most of the pans and tilts, however, all of the travelings were whipped up in post along with a handful of focus point adjustments. For the majority of The Carnival footage, color grading was done in camera. The rest of the footage was adjusted using Color Finesse in Adobe After Effects.

“This style timelapse is used to support the illusion of miniaturization and stop motion feel so normal rules like keeping the shutter open for half the interval don’t apply so well because of subject blurring . The shutter speed depends on the subject, and whether you’re trying to make boats bob like toys in bathtub, or people march like stop motion toys etc. a really good place to start is 0.25 to 0.5 seconds, but you’ll need to experiment as focal length, and subject speed/direction have an impact on how fast something moves through the frame,” added Loutit.

For Further Training on Time-lapse Photography:

Check out this new COMPLETE guide (146 pages) to shooting, processing and rendering time-lapses using a dslr camera. It can be found here: Time-lapse Photography Guide