Oxford Photographer. Kim Martin Photographic. Commercial Professional Photographer. The Kidlington Centre - Central Bridge Removal.

On Sunday the Central Bridge at The Kidlington Centre was taken down.
A team of three from Leofric Structures Limited arrived early and within 4 hours the bridge was gone.
As I stayed with them I thought it would be fun to do a Time Lapse film of the Bridge removal.

I set up the tripod in what I thought would give me the best view and tied the legs of the tripod to some supports to make it as steady as I could. I put on the 35mm prime lens to give me the best view of the proceedings and then went about sorting out the settings. If you haven't done this before it can seem quite complicated but if you do it step by step its easy.
Most DSLR have an Interval timer within the shooting menu, once found there are two settings that you need to work out first how long an interval do you want between shots and how long a time is your whole sequence going to take. Taking care to note the maximum number of shots that the camera can cope with.
I used my Nikon D300 as it is an older camera and it wouldn't be the end of the world if if stopped working. and it can only take 999 shots in one sequence.
So as far as the maths go, the total time for the work was going to be 4 hours but 1 of those would be the setting up and clearing away, so that gave me approximately 3 hours that I needed to film.
1 shot every 10 seconds is 6 shots per minute, 360 in 1 hour and 1080 in 3 hours. That meant that I would have to stop shooting around 2 hours and 45 minutes approximately if I wanted to get it all in one take.
I took an incident light reading and manually focused the lens put the camera into Manual mode and set the ISO, Aperture and Shutter speed to my readings. I went into the menu and opened up the Interval timer shooting mode and set the timer to 10 seconds, normally from left to right you have hours, minutes and then seconds. from there you go into the interval X number of shots which in the case of the D300 is 999. Then all I had to do was decide what file format I would shoot in, As this was only going to end up as a You Tube video I was not worried about the quality so I set the file format to .JPG which on a 16 GB Compact Flash card gave me plenty of space for 999 shots and as they were JPG the buffer time would not cause any problems on the Camera.
So I went to the Interval timer shooting mode and started the shoot.
I stood there for a while counting the time between shots just to make sure.
The only other thing I had to do was check the light every now and again as the sun was rising and moving around, all I had to do was change the settings to match the new readings.
In the end I finished up with 999 images which were very easily converted in Photo Shop into a movie which you can see below. This video is somewhat speedy as it is set to 30 frames per second, if you want to see a slower version then you can go to my Web Site and watch the video there its on the Commercial page.