Lake Time Lapse Video

 

GoPro Hero 3 Setup

Set up for this video. GoPro Hero 3+ Black Edition Mounted on a MeFoto compact tripod. I really like this set up for the lightweight GoPro and the tripod folds up into a very small sizes, yet has a good height.

This time-lapse video was taken with a GoPro Hero 3+ camera in its waterproof housing for easy mounting on a MeFoto tripod.  .  The video begins at 9:16 am and runs to 11:05 am.  This video then compresses just under two hours into 45 seconds.  Somewhere I seem to have misplaced the last 20 minutes of footage, which is unfortunate because the clouds were beginning to change.

I set the camera to take a photo every 2 seconds which was overkill.  The 2-second interval was overkill, but it is better to have too many photos than not enough for time-lapse videos.  I ended up with 3,264 photos.  I edited them all in Adobe Light Room by applying a graduated filter to the sky to prevent the clouds from being too washed out.   I also did some other minor exposure edits and cropped the photo and straightened the horizon slightly.  One of the problems with the old GoPro cameras is the lack of composition without an LCD back makes it difficult to get straight horizons.  Even with the LCD back it can be hard to see in bright sunlight.
After doing a bulk edit on all the photos in Adobe Light Room I imported the photos into Sony Movie Studio Platinum 13.0 adjusted the time of the video and saved it in ADHV format and uploaded it to YouTube where I added a title, annotations, and free music from the YouTube library.

Location

The photos were taken on a deep water marsh of Lake Puckaway where I was doing other work.  I set up the camera and did my other task, which was observing some phragmites plantings about a mile away.  This was the main reason I didn’t let the camera run for too long because it was an even farther distance and out of view of where the camera was.
What would I do Differently?

I don’t think I would have changed much, other than to take a longer series, and it is always nice to have more angles.  I find the wind blowing in the Willows distracting, but if I had turned the camera away from them the video would include the sun and plenty of lens flare.  It would have been better to set up in another location, but my options were limited.

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