Stunning Flowers Time Lapse Photography Video Captures ‘The Bloom’

Katka Pruskova has received many accolades for her stunning flowers time lapse photography video. Her time lapse photography captures the special moment when a flower blooms. To produce the time lapse video, she took over 7,100 photos covering 22 flowers including Amaryllis, Lilies, Zygocactus, Rose, Gladiolus and Gardenia.

This is another great macro photography idea that will motivate and inspire you to try something new. Check out the video and be amazed by her incredible work!

httpv://youtu.be/11hd_fEA9T0

Pruskova has shared some of her insights on how she created the flowers time lapse video on her site (www.pruskova.com). In her behind the scenes post, she reveals the equipment used, camera settings and the art of working out the timings/intervals to take each photo –

Flowers Time Lapse Photography

Flowers time lapse photography is an amazing art.

The most important thing you need is a place that you can insulate from a daylight (in particular from the change of light, you need to keep the light constant all the time). So I found a corner with a cabinet in my living room. I emptied that cabinet, attached a black cloth to the back of it, white boards to the top and one side and shiny silver foil to the other side (boths for light reflection). The flower was in the middle, tripod was in front of it and then the whole setup was covered with another black or dark cloth to (almost 😉 completely insulate it from any light in the room.

As the light source I used two LED lamps. There was no special reason for using those, just two lamps I had at home, they have low power consumption and don’t heat too much. No need to care about the color, always shoot in RAW and fix your white balance in postprocess. I tried not to point the lamps directly at the flower, to make the light more diffused I used reflection (any diffuser would work probably even better)

I was shooting the flowers that I had at home or from my mother’s garden. Visit your local flower shop and ask for a flower that bloom fast.

What I used:

Camera: Canon 5D Mark II with 24-105L
(and several times 17-40L when my 24-105L was broken)

Remote Control (Intervalometer): JJC TM Series (TM-A for my camera)

AC Adapter kit (External power): The camera should be on external power, it is not comfortable to do it on battery (as I found out after getting up at night checking if the battery is still ok 🙂 And changing it on the tripod while trying not to move with the camera wasn’t easy as well). I used an unoriginal adapter kit that I bought from a local store for about $65 (the original one for 5D MkII ACK-E6)

2 LED Lamps: just two lamps that I found at home.
White board and silver foil for reflecting and diffusing the light, black cloth, some clips and of course a tripod (the black Vanguard tripod that you see on the pictures lying on the floor)

My camera setting

Camera on manual mode, f14-f16, time about 1/6s, ISO 640, WB manual (corrected later in CameraRaw) – lower ISO and shorter time would be definitely better, those LED lamps just weren’t strong enough
Focus usually about 50mm (do not zoom in too much to have large depth of field, also the flowers can move and get out of focus if the depth of field is small)

Timing

First you need to know how long it takes the flower to bloom, it can be few hours or few days and the time between photos can be from about 40sec to 10 or more minutes.
Then think about how long the footage should be (I was trying to make each footage about 7-12 seconds), and then just take a calculator and do the math 🙂
For example – 10 seconds video at 30 frames per second, that means you need 300 frames (photos), if it takes 20 hours for the flower to bloom, your interval is about 4 minutes

Once you have captured the bloom in a series of photos, you will need to start thinking about how you will compile them into a time lapse video. There are a range of time lapse software that’s currently available. If you are a beginner in time lapse photography and only require  the basic functionality you can usually survive with using one of the free time lapse software. To assist you, here is a list of some of the popular time lapse software that are currently available.

Time Lapse Software

– Photolapse 3
– VirtualDub
– QuickTime Pro
– Adobe Premiere Elements
– Lightroom
– Adobe After Effects 

If you were impressed and inspired by Pruskova’s flowers time lapse photography video please share this with all your family and friends! And if you love challenges, why don’t you try creating your own time lapse photography video and sharing it with us!

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