My First Time Lapse

Since I saw a Time Lapse of the Yosemite National Park I've wanted to make my own Time Lapse. But with the small camera I had I could do anything more than taking a picture with the timer set to 10 seconds. This Christmas I got a Canon EOS 500D camera, and I started to learn some fantastic tricks.

For my first try, I used my camera and I take a picture manually every minute, during 30 minutes. I used a tripod for the camera not to move too much. The result is amazing, even with only 30 pictures, a picture per frame. I used Adobe After Effects CS4 to put together the pictures. It's very easy. You just have to import all the pictures and select "Secuence". Then you select the pictures per second that you want to show and that's it, you got your Time Lapse. The result is this:

But what I really wanted was to make a automatic Time Lapse. I wanted my camera to take each picture by itself, but with my actual firmware (1.1.1) I wasn't able to do that. But I found some way to change that. There is a firmware, made by some photograph geeks that extends the capabilities of the Canon cameras: Magic Lantern. It's very easy to install it. You just format your sd card and insert it in your pc to transfer data (connected to a sd card reader, not into the camera). You put the downloaded Magic Lantern on your root and put the sd card again into the camera and then install the firmware with the menu tool to do that.

With the new firmware now I was able to take 1 picture every 30 seconds without any limit of pictures so I left the camera running and I got 200 pictures. I put some music and this is the result: