As I mention on last month post Sun and The Climbing Photographer, on Sunday, 22 April 2012 , I and my friend Sidik Soleman try to make a time lapse video. We choose the Car Free Day on Juanda Street, Bandung near the Ganesha Campus of Bandung Institute of Technology. Car Free Day is one day that any motored vehicle is forbidden to pass across one protocol street. It becomes huge place for events, promo, doing sport, and gathering for people. Essentially, we chose that place because of it’s crowd.

As we promised, you can see the video in this post. And you know what? This is my first upload on Youtube. Yay! At last, I seen the upload page of that site and became a contributor not just a viewer.

Originally we plan to take a shot of the street when it’s still dark and until it’s filled with car. Seeing the street empty, and one by one filled with people, and then one by one the cars passing as the Car Free Day reach it’s end time would be fun, we thought. But, plan is just a plan without some careful planning.

This video is just a “trial for fun” to make a time lapse video. We two only use a digital camera with no tripod or additional lens at all. We just hold the camera or tied it on some pillar in the middle of the street. We then manually click the shutter periodically. Because we were only holing the camera with our hand,  the result in the video is shaky.

We didn’t even google “how to make a time lapse” at all. We just tried it without any prior knowledge of it and without proper equipment. We didn’t know that a normal time lapse video is taken by automatically clicking the shutter periodically with a device called intervalometer.

We thought that it’s best to use a proper camera, not just integrated camera on hand phone. So, we borrowed the camera from friends. It’s a water resistant digital camera, unfortunately not a DSLR one.

The first location was front of Bank Rakyat Indonesia. We took the picture by tying the camera to a lamp street literally. It’s not stable as you can see in the video. When the shutter’s pressed, the camera was tilted here and there after all. The second location was in front of SMA N 1 Bandung. We sat the stair on the overpass in front of the high school.

When taking the photo, the camera lens is condensed due to cold weather in the morning. As you can see in the video, there are some blurred part in it. I remove the camera from the pillar of lamp street because of the lens actually. I was very surprised that the lens became like that. It’s a borrowed camera you know. The fog on the lens is still there until we reach the second later sometime later. Sidik just take the picture with the foggy lens. You can see the blurred part clearly on the second sequence. Well, we are very sorry about that. It’s our first trial after all.

Total 427 pictures’ taken. The first sequence (64 pics) played on 3 fps and the second sequence (363 pics) played on 15 fps. The background music is taken from soundcloud. Originally the music is used by time lapse video of sunset on Key West by feelda303.You can see his/her video here.

It have been fun making this video. Maybe we will do another and properer time lapse project soon. Thank you for watching. Hope you like it.

Read also Sidik’s part of the story: Our First Timelapse Video at CFD Juanda Bandung (sidiksoleman.wordpress.com).