My time-lapse sequence of the Artefact H10515 exhibition was shot with a Canon EOS-1D Mk1 fitted with a 20mm f2.8 wide-angle lens and a Canon Remote Control Timer which I set to trigger every 2 or 15 minutes depending on the amount of activity I thought would occur each day.
The camera was mounted on the lighting-grid in the ceiling of the exhibition using a Manfrotto 3D tripod head on a super clamp. In that location the camera was surrounded by exhibition lighting which would probably be repositioned during the exhibition installation so I added a pair of make-shift ‘barn-doors’ on either side of the lens to minimise lens-flare.
Once I had the camera positioned I connected its AC converter to a continuous power supply and set the camera to manual focus with Aperture-Priority automatic exposure set to f11 at 100 ISO. The exhibition is relatively dark and I knew my exposures would vary between 5 and 30 seconds but that suited me because I wanted to blur the motion of people working on the installation.
The project took about 30 days to shoot using two 4Gb SandDisk Extreme III CF memory cards and every day or two I checked the camera and swapped cards so it would continue its capture while I used Adobe Photoshop CS3 to download, edit and process the latest RAW files into screen-sized JPGs.
Altogether I shot about 2000 images, which I edited down to around 1100, and 850 effective shots that could be used in 60-second and 90-second versions of the time lapse sequence. The shorter of these started at the point where the exhibition developers installed new rear-projection material on the inside of the glass cube to achieve better image contrast than the material originally specified.
Finally I used an early version of Apple iMovie software to produce the two time-lapse sequences using a duration of 0.3 seconds for the majority of the images, with longer transitions at the beginning and end where I used titles and some supplementary images to finish off the project.
Photography and post by Geoff Friend
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