Sometimes it takes weeks of planning, waiting and a long drive in the middle of the night to shoot the stills for a time lapse video.
But sometimes you can just look out of your kitchen window, notice something interesting going on, nip out with camera and tripod and set it off taking exposures while you head back inside for a cup of tea and a look at the latest goings on at Wimbledon.
The latter is what happened to me last week, as the sky above my house was filled with this slowly moving sheet of stratocumulus clouds a couple of hours before sunset.
I did have to take some care in setting up the camera to take the shots, such as fitting a polarising filter to darken the blue of the sky, and making sure the zoom adjustment was hard against its minimum setting stop so it didn't creep down during the session. (A lesson learnt from experience with upward pointing cameras!)
Apart from that, taking and post processing this video was so easy-peasy I'm almost ashamed to show it off - surely a work of art has to involve blood sweat and tears, not cups of tea and tennis on the telly!
Even so, watching the finished video is strangely mesmerising - what do you think?
Filename - clouds timelapse 07.mp4
Camera - Canon 6D
Lens - 24-105mm zoom @24mm
Exposure (start of sequence)
1/160 sec, f4, ISO100
Exposure (end of sequence)
1/160 sec, f4, ISO100
Time between exposures - 3 secs
Location - North Wales
This clip - HD 720p
Clip duration - 35 secs
All content copyright © Howard Litherland 2009-2026 unless otherwise stated.