Photography Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for professional, enthusiast and amateur photographers. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
Time lapses are usually achieved by having a stationary camera and an intervalometer in a fixed position. However a friend of mine challenged me if it's possible to shoot on the same spot without a fixed camera with just remembering tripod settings and lenses, once a week for over a year and just stitch edit/stabilized in post?
Are there tripods that have an angle/tilt/ guide? It's going to be a building construction.
However a friend of mine challenged me if it's possible to shoot on the same spot without a fixed camera with just remembering tripod settings and lenses, once a week for over a year and just stitch edit/stabilized in post?
It's certainly possible. The camera doesn't know or care if it's been moved or locked in place the whole time, so if you have a repeatable method for positioning the camera, there's nothing to hold you back.
On the other hand... one image every week over a year only gives you 52 images, which is barely enough for 2 seconds of video. You should give some thought to adjusting the time of day of the shot throughout the seasons to help maintain a similar light level. Even so, weather is going to make it difficult to get good-looking time-lapse. On the whole, it seems like a lot of work for a flickery 2-second video.
Are there tripods that have an angle/tilt/ guide?
Many tripod heads have markings that let you repeat settings, but that won't help if you don't have a way to orient the tripod. So, you'll need some way to locate the tripod and orient the head. That could be as simple as using a tape to measure distances to a couple of fixed points (like trees). Or, if you can mark the position with a bit of paint, or just use some existing mark as the position for the tripod, that'd work too. If it's a construction site, look around for survey marks. One more option: you can buy a relative GPS system accurate to about a centimeter for around $1000.
Once the position is established, use the camera to orient the head by putting it on the tripod and centering the image on some chosen point. Adjust the head so that it reads zero with that point centered.
Installing a quick release socket in a fixed location (instead of a tripod, you likely want to dig/hammer a solid wooden fencepost into the ground there) and making sure that you don't need to move the quick release plate from your camera (so it shouldn't block battery or memory card or other essentials) should allow you to reliably return to a fixed position as long as nobody sabotages your setup eventually.
Yes, If you also have 2 well defined spots, a target and a center of your camera.
