Yesterday afternoon I drove to Edison, NJ to see the Thomas Edison Memorial Tower. This is the site of Thomas Edison’s first R&D laboratory and where the light bulb and sound recording was invented. The surrounding park was a bit small and the tower a bit large, so I had to do something I’ve never done before: a portrait style timelapse. I always shoot my timelapses in landscape for videos but the tower would have been cut-off with this style of video.
The image below is my first shot of the hyperlapse which has the entire tower in the frame.
For my hyperlapse, I took one step every block on the ground and took another photo. I make sure the focus is on the light bulb each time and then take the photo. My focal point was the light bulb so that I could keep it in the same spot of my frame each shot during the hyperlapse. I was using aperture priority since I was shooting near sunset and the light could change quite a bit. I was using f/6.3 and ISO 800 and a shutter speed of 1/160 second. I took 90 photos over 12 minutes.
My last photo is above and as you can see I stil have a lot of the tower in the frame. Overall. this turned out pretty nice. This style still wont be my first choice but its nice when needed! Looks really good on Instagram too on a phone!