How to shoot a time-lapse at home

Time-lapse sequences enable you to capture the passing of time and reveal details that the human eye cannot see. There are lots of subjects that suit this technique, from clouds passing over a landscape to the movement of stars across the night sky to a bustling city scene. But you can also achieve great results by shooting indoors, where you'll have more control over the lighting – and you don’t have to worry about the weather.

Flowers opening their petals make interesting subjects for a time-lapse, although the process can take several days to complete. The sequence works well as a series of still images or turned into a movie.

For consistent lighting, avoid setting up your shoot near a window or a source of natural light, and instead use artificial light. Lamps and LED panels can work well, although flash can also be a good option in some situations.

Use a large piece of card to provide a clean background and compose your picture so that there will be enough room for the petals to open. With your camera in Manual (M) mode, set your exposure, focus manually and choose a suitable White Balance preset and Picture Style so that each image will look the same.

There’s also a dedicated ‘Time-lapse movie’ mode that combines images shot at a specific interval. To access this, you need to set the camera to Movie mode.

Once enabled, you'll be able to set the interval between each frame and the number of shots that you want to make up the entire video. As you input these numbers, the camera will display how long the sequence will take to record and the duration of the finished movie. Make sure you have enough battery power to get you through the shoot!

You can use a remote control to take a series of images at regular intervals yourself, or you can use your camera’s dedicated 'Interval timer’. With this activated in the menu, you can set the number of shots and the interval between each of them, and the camera takes care of the rest.

If you want to build a movie from these images, you'll need to prepare the images by cropping to a video aspect ratio and applying any colour correction or effects to each ‘frame’ of your movie. Use editing software to combine the images into your final time-lapse clip. Bear in mind that you'll need to shoot a lot of pictures: for instance, a 30-second clip played back at 24 frames a second will require 720 shots. If you used an interval of 10 seconds between shots, the camera would need to be shooting for two hours.

If you’d rather speed up the time it takes to put together a time-lapse, choose a subject which will take minutes rather than days to record. Melting objects such as ice cubes, ice cream and chocolate are a good choice, and you can speed up the process using a hair dryer.

The chocolate rabbit was placed on a sheet of glossy white acrylic, which was raised to a suitable working height, and a piece of red card was used as the backdrop. An off-camera Speedlite was placed out of the camera's view below the acrylic and pointed at the background, while on-camera flash was used to light the rabbit. The camera was set to Manual (M), and the shutter speed set to the camera's flash sync speed so that only the light from the Speedlites would create the exposure. The aperture and ISO were adjusted until the image looked correct.

The melting would be slow at the start of the process and gradually increase in speed, so triggering the tripod-mounted camera manually would allow the interval between each shot to be adjusted accordingly. As we had set up a Wi-Fi enabled camera, we used the Camera Connect app installed on a mobile device to fire the shutter remotely at intervals of 4-8 seconds.

So you really don't have to devote days to shooting a time-lapse – see what you can achieve in a few minutes with a table-top set-up at home, then use that experience when you're planning an awe-inspiring motion time-lapse of the Milky Way!