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I’ve just got back from three weeks on the road, traveling to and from a big meet-up of panoramic photographers in Prague. But I’ll write about that another time...

By one of those strange coincidences that sometimes happen, the evening we got back was the same evening that there was a partial eclipse of the Moon over SW England, which my wife spotted by chance (with me no longer being the space nut of my teenage years). Leaping out of the bath and dripping water everywhere, I joined her at the (unlit) window to have a look, and then (after a bit of drying) to take some photos.

After quite a bit of fiddling getting the exposure right, I eventually left the camera running with a timer remote taking a picture every ten seconds, and finished my bath.

Aperture has grown into a pretty handy tool for timelapse photography, especially with Quick Preview mode.

I import the images as normal, then put all the images for a particular image sequence into it’s own Album.

As you can see, the Moon is pretty small in the frame, as I was using a 70-200mm f4L on a Canon 5D (fullframe), so the Moon itself is only 200px across, but for a video this is still reasonably big.

Next comes some basic adjustments to colour and levels - the camera was still on ‘shade’ WB from earlier in the day, so as nice as the orange colour might be, I wanted to get rid of it, and also bring up the mid-tones.

After that, cropping. The Moon moved quite a bit during the sequence, as the camera was on a regular tripod rather than an equatorial mount, so I started by cropping with quite a bit of space to the right of the Moon.

After some back-and-forth lift-n-stamping of crops between the first and last images in the sequence, I decided on the final crop, then stamped the final settings onto all the images in the sequence.

Once the thumbnails have finished generating, you can now get a good preview of the sequence by going into Quick Preview mode and simply holding down the left arrow key. Note that this may run a bit less smoothly if you’ve got large Previews being generated.

After exporting all the images as JPEGs, I loaded them up into QuickTime Pro as a video at 25fps, saved it out as in h264 format and uploaded it to my website.

Timelapse is a lot of fun, I highly recommend having a go!

Ian