22 January 2007
Time-lapse Photography Using a Nokia N80
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The flower of a geranium opening over a period of about two hours. Consecutive frames are 7 minutes apart. |
As I took my daily tour over the numerous blogs, sites and forums that I read regularly I found something really catching my eye and which redirected me to the Foozia Blog.
Taking the photos is all good and well, but taking a sequence of photographs and than creating cool animation of them can be really interesting.
Some cameras actually have time-lapse photography built in, it’s easy to implement, but we aren’t that lucky, current Symbian phones lacks this feature, there is slice mode on some phones indeed, but we can’t set the delay period among the two shots or set the number of shots as well. Therefore if we want to take some time-lapse photos we have to take the pictures manually which isn’t very handy.
By the way, for those that don’t know, Time-lapse photography is a method of recording events over long periods of time that can later be played back in much shorter periods of time. Instead of shooting film frame-by-frame as a continuous movie, time-lapse works by shooting a single frame of film, then waiting for an interval of time before shooting the next frame.
The longer the intervals between shots, the faster time will appear to pass when the final film is played. For example, suppose it takes twenty hours for a daffodil to bloom. A time–lapse film could show the full bloom cycle in less than a minute.
Anyway, lets go back to the point, it seams that we have solution now, there is a little Python script that allows you to do time-lapse photography using a symbian device using Python S60 3rd Edition. The script asks you how many photos you wish to take and the delay between each picture.
You can also choose different settings for the pictures. Application is tested only on a Nokia N80 so far; it should works on other 3rd Ed phones also, but might need some tweaking for other phones.
To be honest I haven’t found anything to take a time-lapse photograph of yet, maybe I’ll get some flowers for my girlfriend tomorrow and test it out ;)
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