My barely one-year-old camera came out second best in an altercation between it, my toddler and the coffee table. Over a period of a few months it eventually succumbed to its injuries and just didn’t want to work any more.
The quote to fix it was almost as much as buying a new camera, so I ended up buying a second hand Nikon with about the same specs so I could still use Nikon specific lenses and other hardware with it. The camera I bought came with four batteries, which aren’t cheap, a memory card and a tilt lens.
Check out the short tilt time-lapse video.
If you aren’t familiar with a tilt lens, or tilt-shift as most of them are, they are simply able to tilt away from being parallel to the camera sensor, which makes the plane of focus diagonal and creates out of focus areas along the top and bottom of the frame. I’d seen timelapses made with these types of lenses before and the miniature effect they achieve looks really interesting.
I’d been itching to give it a go and took the camera on a practice run around Brisbane river where I was able to get familiar with how to use it. The results were nothing to write home (or a blog) about but helped me to understand what would make a decent subject.
It all had to do with the vantage point. Being a 50mm lens, it’s quite zoomed in compared to what I was used to with the 16-50mm kit lens. So I knew I needed to be high up and reasonably far away from the subject of the time-lapse.
Conveniently, we decided to take a little trip up to Caloundra for a few nights away, and Jade had booked a hi-rise apartment for us to stay in. This meant that I could set the camera on the balcony and not worry about it while it did its time-interval thing, and luckily for me, the balcony overlooked the park across the street at the entrance to the beach, which allowed a few different scenes to choose from.
I’m reasonably happy with how it came out, but I still think there’s some room for improvement. It seems that having it look good in the viewfinder doesn’t necessarily guarantee great shots but it is a starting point for future tilt-lapses. So hopefully you’ll enjoy looking at the short one-minute video and if you’re into tilt-shift, let me know what I can do to improve my next attempts.
See ya later!
