Time-Lapse Photography in the Falkland Islands

Hi, I'm Ian Plant, managing editor of Outdoor Photography Guide. And today, I'm in front of the king penguin colony in the beautiful Falkland Islands. And I've decided to do a time-lapse. And I'm using my Canon 5DS R which has an automatic time-lapse feature. You can also use a device called an intervalometer which allows you to program the time-lapse sequence and set it off.

I've got it set up so that the camera is taking a shot every two seconds, and it's gonna run and do about 900 shots. And that's gonna end up giving me a time-lapse movie of approximately 30 seconds. I'm using a wide-angle lens. I'm zoomed up pretty far. And I've got everything set to manual mode.

So I've set my exposure manually, I've set my focus manually, so that nothing changes from shot to shot. The only thing that's gonna change are the penguins that are moving around and the clouds that are drifting overhead. And the light probably is gonna change as well. Right now, it's in full sunlight. But when a cloud drifts in front of the sun, it's gonna block the light and put the scene in the shadow.

So I set my exposure for the full sunlight so that nothing is overexposed. And I think this is actually gonna be very creative when the sun's coming in and out of the clouds, you'll see periods of the time-lapse that are nice and bright with the animals lit and then periods where the whole scene goes into shadow when a cloud passes in front of the sun. So I think as the scene alternates between light and shadow that this is gonna give us a really nice time-lapse sequence. So I've got everything set. All I need to do is trigger the shutter, and away it goes.

Now I just have to wait for about a half an hour to get that 30 second time-lapse movie.