This is one of my first big photography related projects. A proper time lapse movie. Between one-hundred twenty and one-hundred fifty seconds long. Inspired by all those short travel video time lapses that are a dime-a-dozen on Youtube.
Time lapse videos have always been super fun to watch, anything from someone with a GoPro building a pool to the galactic core moving across the night sky filmed by a National Geographic videographer. The video that really got my creative juices flowing was this Welcome to Berlin time lapse that showed up in my YouTube recommendations a few months ago.
Back in February I started shooting a few time lapse sequences, with it really becoming a more consistent activity in July and August. Everything in my video was shot after work, or on weekends. I’d wait for the light to get nice, go set up somewhere, and tell everybody walking by that it is OK to walk through my shot (please do, I actually want you in this shot).
I also got some great stills out of this project, some of which I’ve printed and put on the wall. The one below didn’t make it into the video, but it’s still one of my favorite shots of 2017.
ISO 320 | f/11 | 2s | 24mm
I learned a lot during this project, and I cannot wait to start my next one. I had a little taste of all the different video editors out there, from Premiere Elements, to Davinci Resolve, to Sony Vegas, and I finally settled on Adobe’s Premiere Pro (free trial anyway. I wasted so much time trying to make the free/cheap editors do what I wanted. I can just pick up a month of Premiere Pro when I need it in the future (software by subscription has benefits afterall).
Anyway, without any further fanfare, here is my time lapse video, Welcome to Downtown Plano. It shows the hustle and bustle that is Plano’s historic downtown. Every shot is on a short segment of 15th Street, between I Ave and Municipal.
Ben There Shot That 