This year for Canada Blooms, Landscape Ontario's garden building team decided to have a time lapse made.  The results were excellent based on what we set up and here's a little background on how it was done.  The concept of a time lapse is simple, take a lot of photos from the same position and string them all together into a video.  To accomplish this here's the equipment we used...

• Nikon D90 digital SLR camera
• Nikkor 18-105mm VR lens set at 18mm
  
• pclix intervalometer with a compatible cable for the D90
• 8GB memory cards
• tallest lighting stand we could find - 12 feet
• Manfrotto clamp
• Manfrotto tri-pod mount
• A/C adapter for camera

Having never been to the Direct Energy Centre as an exhibitor in the past, we weren't sure where we would be able to put up our camera so we needed to settle with bringing our own stand to mount the camera.  This was actually more complicated than we would have thought as tri-pod heights max out so we needed to use a lighting stand instead.  Because the lighting stand isn't a tri-pod we needed to make a tripod mount to connect to it and fortunately Manfrotto makes a universal clamp which allows you to mount to anything you desire.

Once we had the rig all set up we did some testing and found that we couldn't have a battery last more than about 16 hours in the camera so we had to buy an A/C adapter so that we could plug the camera in and the only thing we would need to change would be the memory cards.

The pclix intervalometer makes the camera shoot at the interval you wish to shoot at and after doing the math we wanted to get over 24 hours between card changes so we went with every 40 seconds as our interval. 

Here's the final product...



Our end result was excellent with what we had to work with but here's what we're doing next which would only give us better results...

With the proper certifications we can climb a tall extension ladder, or use a scissor lift and mount the camera high up in this (or any other) venue, given our time restraints for this event, it wasn't an option.  This would have completely removed any of the camera movement by the workers and while changing cards resulting in a steadier video.

With the clamp securing the camera in place and a long extension cord to the ground, power isn't an issue and to make changing memory cards a thing of the past, Eye-Fi has now created the perfect solution.  Their newest line of WiFi memory cards allow you to create an ad-hoc connection with your memory card and you can now set them in an auto-emptying mode which would give us unlimited storage for our time lapse photos.  Once the photo is taken, it's transmitted wirelessly to a computer below and the space is available on the card again.

From the camera aspect, if we're this close to the picture again we'll get a wider lens so that we can capture more of the action.  There was also some interest in a slow pan which would require us to find a motor of some sort to slowly move the camera over the course of hours.

All in all this has been an excellent experiment and the results speak for themselves.  This video was being displayed outside the landscapeontario.com Green for Life garden at Canada Blooms and we have never seen more people stop to watch a TV in a trade show in all of our years of putting on these events.  If you're interested in having us create one for your event, please contact us and hopefully we can create something you will be proud to show off to your clients.