When making time lapses, often dedication and effectiveness go hand and hand. After putting hours of your time and patience into shooting a time lapse, the last thing you want to do is find out something went wrong before you even began. Here are the top ten most crucial time lapse mistakes photographers often make. Do your best to watch out for these and you will have many time lapses that would have otherwise been ruined, that is assuming you charged your batteries, brought enough memory and didn’t forget your intervalometer!

10.    Lack of Supplies

You’ve done plenty work to make sure your camera and camera supplies are ready to last for hours on end when its time to shoot, but what about you!? Think ahead. It may be a beautiful day when you arrive to your shooting location, but as the hours pass and night falls you may find yourself in desperate need of some warmer clothes, a place to sit, something to eat! A jacket, a snack, and a chair should be the least you bring. I find good company passes the time best, though sometimes it’s nice to be alone with the elements. You will obviously have more obligations and less freedom while waiting for your time lapse to finish if you were filming in a public park rather than an isolated mountain top.. So what you bring and what you want to do until your time lapse finishes is up to you and your location. Just don’t forget about your needs as well as your cameras!

9.      Image Stabilizer

Turn off your image stabilizer if you have one. If your doing your time lapse properly to begin with, your camera and base will be as solid as a rock and there will be no need for an image stabilizer. Some image stabilizing lenses use gyroscopic sensors that can often cause erratic results on a tripod possibly ruining some of your shots. Additionally the image stabilizer will takes extra battery power from the camera to operate. All in all the image stabilizer is a bad idea for time lapses..

8.      Dirty Lens/ Filter

With all the changes foregoing your images during a time lapse, theres no way a consistent smudge, scratch, or hair on your lens or filter will go unnoticed in the final video. In fact if your camera is relatively safe I would suggest taking a filter off all together.

7.      Foreground/ Background Interruptions

If your location and subject permits, I would suggest monitoring whats going on in your cameras field of view. Before you start, take a look at where the edges of your frame are and make a visual reference. Do your best to stay out of that frame, and don’t set your camera up somewhere prone to interruptions. If your doing a time lapse at Disneyland then obviously people walking in and around your frame is probably the point and there would be no need for protecting the field of view. But when you’re filming early in the morning down a nearly empty pier, and a jogger decides to rest himself right in your frame for a lengthy foot massage it might be time to kindly speak up and save your shot.

6.      Lack of Planning

Many time lapse shots will require that you do a bit a of planning ahead of time. Not accounting for drastic changes in light or movement is a sure way to ruin your shot over time. Changes in light is a whole other issue so I will just mention changes in movement for now. If your are doing a sunset time lapse you probably should guess/ calculate the path and distance that the sun will travel over the period of your time lapse. With this bit of planning you can frame your shot accordingly as to not ruin it with bad composition due to a lack of planning. So do your best to calculate where your subject will be not only at the beginning of your time lapse, but at the end as well.

Stay tuned as in a few months I will be coming out with an in depth article and tutorial on how to shoot the Total Lunar Eclipse of December 2011. This will be a very specific article with actual suggested interval times and camera settings for your desired total running time.

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