Flowers like these make interesting subjects for stop-motion photography.
Stop motion photography allows you to capture a length of time and then speed it up into a movie. Subtle changes and trends that may be barely visible to the naked eye become dramatic and visible. Flowers and plants are great subjects for time-lapse stop motion photography due to their beauty and their delicate movements and growth. You can document a flower's entire lifespan, from sprouting to growing, blooming and dying, and show it in a beautiful movie that only lasts 30 seconds.
Instructions
1. Decide the length of time you want to capture on film. Documenting a growing flower could span several weeks, while a flower blowing in the wind could span a few hours or minutes.
2. Determine how long you want your film to last. Your film can be short--say, 20 seconds--or several minutes long. Longer movies usually require more pictures.
3. Calculate how many pictures you want to take. Most finished films have 20-30 frames per second. The more pictures per second, the smoother your film will appear, and the fewer pictures per second, the choppier it will appear. A 30-second film at 26 frames per second would require 780 pictures.
4. Divide the total time span you wish to capture of the flowers in seconds by the total amount of frames you need to take. This will give you the interval between pictures in seconds.
5. Set up your flowers and the area to be filmed, being conscious of the lighting and how it will affect the overall film.
6. Change your camera's settings to a manual exposure and white balance, and use a longer exposure for a smoother movie and a shorter exposure for a choppier effect.
7. Set the timer to the appropriate interval that you calculated earlier and begin shooting flowers until you've reached the desired number of frames.
8. Upload the photos to your computer and make any needed edits before you use animation software to string them together into a time-lapse stop motion film.
