Understanding The Time-Lapse Interval

On this video, photographer Jay P. Morgan from the Slanted Lens looks at the effects of changing the interval between shots during time lapse.

When you shoot a timelapse there are different settings that you need to set – you have the normal cameras settings – ISO, shutter speed and aperture but you have another additional one – the time between frames.

The interval between frames effects how fast things are going to change in your final video – the shorter the time between frames the less movement you are going to see in your video. In this video Morgan demonstrates the difference between 2/4/8 seconds intervals and depending on what you are shooting – each of these can work (if you have a fairly fast moving object you might want 2 or even a 1 second interval however if your subject is slow – you might want an 8 second interval or even slower. In any case you will need to experiment a little bit in order to get a feel of what is the right interval for what situation.

We recently published another introduction video on shooting timelapse by Chase Kubasiak from Zacuto, another video by photographer Morgan looking at shooting timelapse videos with and without movement of the camera, from different angles with his own tips on the subject as well as a second video on the subject entitled “Combining Time Lapse and Video at Sunset” and we posted several other guides for shooting timelapses including a step by step one by Corey Rich as well as a very comprehensive guide to time-lapse photography with photographer Vincent Laforet in 3 parts (the first episode in the series here and the second video here and the 3′rd can be found here) as well as a much more basic guide by photographer Gavin Hoey called “Timelapse Photography Tutorial“.

You can watch more HDSLR and video techniques on our dedicated HDSLR channel here on LensVid and you can find all of Jay P. Morgan’s videos here on LensVid on the following link.

Iddo Genuth

Iddo Genuth is the founder and chief editor of LensVid.com. He has been a technology reporter working for international publications since the late 1990's and covering photography since 2009. Iddo is also a co-founder of a production company specializing in commercial food and product visual content.