Time Lapse on my Smartphone

 For the last few weeks, I have been playing around with time lapse, trying to get a feel for what works and what doesn't.  One aspect that I have been messing around with is doing time lapse with my phone.  Ideally, I would always shoot with my DSLR, but that isn't always practical.  The fact that my phone is always available and produces solid images, makes it a good tool for the job.  I have tried a few different apps that I found on the Android Market and have settled on Lapse It • Time Lapse • Pro.  I spent all of $1.99 for it.  There is a free version, but it restricts some of the features and only allows you to shoot in 240p.

The app gives you a decent amount of features to control.  All of the regulars like interval, delay, and duration.  In addition, you can silence your shutter sound (if your phone allows it), and change the screen brightness to help conserve battery life.

This app will also render the video for you.  As you can see, it gives you options to trim out frames, add effects like B&W conversion, and even add music.  I prefer to import my images into Lightroom and render the video there, so I haven't played around with these features too much.  On a couple of the smaller projects, the features that I did try seemed to work out pretty well.  As my projects have gotten bigger, I have relied on Lightroom and my PC to do the heavy processing.

So far, I am pleased with the results.  I have a few more projects in mind that I want to try, including shooting during sunrise or sunset.  I'm curious to see how it will handle the change in exposure.

This weekend, I had the opportunity to give the app a pretty good workout.  I shot a series of images that you see listed in the above screenshot.  3900 images over a little more than 3 hours of a road trip.  I processed the images in Lightroom, condensing it down to under 3 minutes of video.

For best results, use this LINK to watch the video posted on YouTube.  It's worth taking the time to watch it in 720p and giving it time to buffer.