The holy grail of timelapse movies is motion. Photographers like Tom Lowe (whom you should definitely check out) uses state of the art rails and mechanisms to allow the camera to move slowly and smoothly while capturing frame by frame of the time lapse movie.
While we were playing silly egg timer over here, Photographer Derek Mellott came up with an ingenious way to convert a BBQ rotisserie motor into a moving rail system.
To add insult to injury, Derek uses a TI Graphing Calculator as an Intervalometer. The longtimers here know that I have a soft spot for anything TI ;). Video and a second hack after the jump.This is how Derek describes it:
I decided to to throw together a “motion control” unit for time lapse photography, this is the result of my first attempt.
It is powered by a BBQ rotisserie motor.
It isn’t pretty and it doesn’t work great but I’m going to keep working on it until I can afford to buy a real one from
dynamicperception.com They inspired my to build this because I just couldn’t wait to use this technique.
If you thought that was smart see Derek’s solution for creating rotation:
All I did to make the camera rotate is attach a stick to the head, when
the stick made contact with the tree the camera rotated following the
tree. See photo below.
