Cloud timelapses are fun when you can put the camera somewhere and go and do something else. Yesterday I knew that we would go from blue skies and sparse clouds to overcast and rainy so I set up the camera to record a timelapse. I set the interval to one setting and the number of frames to one. You see the rain clouds form and then the rain starts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQPB9pQGN9A
This timelapse was recorded over 220 minutes or more. It took a full charge of one of the long duration batteries. I could have plugged the camera and used power straight from the wall but sometimes it’s good to cycle batteries.
I really wanted the rain to fall so heavily that it would be impossible to see through the window at the end of the timelapse. That would have made for a nice conclusion.
It is not rare for me to do a timelapse from La Barillette. Several years ago I tried a timelapse with a 360 camera where you saw clouds forming overhead and in a spherical video. I also filmed a timelapse of the Paléo parkings filling up. This time I went up the Jura in the hope of filming Autumn colours but as I got to the top my project changed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yPSUd2z434
The problem with filming Autumn colours is that you need to be there at the right time of day and with the light coming from the right direction. The light was coming from the wrong angle so stopping in the woods would have allowed me to get three or four frames before moving on to the next location.
When you’re in a car this type of filming is not interesting. It’s more interesting to get to one location and get a greater diversity of shots. The other advantage is that you can always head back down and get the shots you thought were still interesting.
As I looked from above and assessed the situation I saw that clouds were forming and dissipating. I thought that I may eventually find myself in a cloud with poor visibility. I was more interested in capturing the formation of clouds. They did form, but then they dissipated, and then they formed again but more sparsly before dissipating again.
This is fantastic when you’re filming time-lapses because the change is noticeable without being accelerated so you can imagine what it would give if you did speed it up.
The challenge with timelapse is knowing whether something will take minutes, hours, days or even longer to capture. I have one idea that I assess would take six or seven hours which I will not discuss at this stage.
Usually when I film timelapses I set the camera up so that it records one or two frames every so many seconds. In this case I just started recording. I did not know on what timescale the actions would occur so it gave me greater flexibility in post production.
The footage was sped up from 800 percent to 5000 percent. The clouds that were vanishing was fast. The river of clouds flowing down the valley was slower and thus sped up more. The other challenge is to decide how tight or wide you want the frame to be. With the trees and the river of clouds it’s hard to know whether to have a tighter shot where the action may render the frame boring sooner or wehter tom have a wide shot where the action only takes up half the screen.
In the end this is about gaining experience rather than getting things right first time. It’s about learning to see and anticipate how nature will behave. If you get it right then it can be of great beauty. If you get it wrong you ignore it and think of a new idea.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5AK3mmNMLg
Later in the year, when Autumn comes we can expect the clouds to behave like this. It’s the “Soupe de Pois” as some call it. I have at least two or three ideas to experiment with and two of them can be done from the comfort of home.
I did see something exceptional on the way back down. A herd of five chevreuils as I drove down afer I finished getting my timelapse footage. That’s the most I’ve seen at once when driving.
Time-lapse videos are fun because we can see something happen faster or slower than real time. By watching this content we gain a better understanding of the world and how it works. For years I have been filming time-lapses and the results can be fun. In some cases we record time-lapses with video cameras and at other times we set an interval timer to take pictures every so many seconds. In this post you will be watching clouds form as a 360 timelapse.
I have chosen to share both the flat image and the spherical image. The reason for sharing both versions is to give you an overview of how objects move in both.
Spherical Version
With this version look to your right and you will be able to watch the clouds move through space. As they move you will see them grow thicker and then cover the sun. At this point everything gets darker. If you watch this video a few times you can watch the landscape change.
The next step would be to get a 360 camera somewhere high during a total eclipse of the sun by the moon. During such events you will see a grey mask cross over the landscape, you will see birds fly away and then everything will be dark. You can then turn around and watch totality, the corona and then the reverse process. The time is right for eclipse chasers to be at the right place to capture such an event as a 360 video.
Flat Version
With the flat version you can imagine where you would aim a standard camera. Would you try to get the clouds that are forming over the mast or would you prefer to look out towards La Dôle and watch as the large clouds form and float to block off the sun? In this image you can see from Villeneuve and Lausanne to Geneva and the Salève.
Having such a wide angle of view allows you to see everything that is going on in front of and behind the camera. The timelapse is a sequence of pictures rather than video so in future I hope to export the video in a higher resolution.
I would like to see more climbing documentaries where there is a timelapse of people making their way up. They look like ants rather than humans as a result. That part is 2 minutes and 20 seconds in.
I’m back in Switzerland now and I’ve been around for a little over a day now. I can’t be bothered going out so I’m watching one of the discovery earth documentaries and there’s a really interesting series of plant time-lapses that have been included. They’re used to illustrate what happens when a tree falls down and how the plants struggle with speed to take advantage of the increase in light.
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