Handheld Hyperlapse across 1km walk [6th of 52 Timelapse Project]

Last few weeks I was testing smooth handheld hyperlapses with a gimbal. You’ve probably seen my Handheld Hyperlapse Tutorial, which I released a few days ago. This Sunday I give it another try, because I got a new idea – using a joystick (with modified parameters) for controlling turns and camera tilt.

This is a shot from my 52 Timelapse Project. You can check out the details of the project or full list of the shots.

This week was quite hard for me. I’m a kind of guy who likes to do his homework on Saturday just not to think about it on Sunday. This was the first time I made my shot just a day before the deadline. Earlier this week I was trying to shoot motion controlled shot of melting ice, but there were some complications (as always, damn Murphy’s laws…). I won’t describe here that idea because I still want to do that, it just needs more time to prepare than I thought 😉

First of all – it was quite a long shot. I checked on Google maps that I covered 1km (over 0.6 miles) walk. In the future I will probably try something even longer, however it was already a tough task to do. But hey, free workout! 🙂

I used my GH4 and Sigma 10-20mm as always, mounted on a Easystab gimbal. The camera parameters were:

• 1″ shutter speed
• f/4.5
• ISO 200
• 1 sec interval

The built-in intervalometer works differently from some of the external devices – it doesn’t count exposure as a part of the interval. So the overall interval was 2 sec. I described it in details in Motion Blur post.

The one difference over the previous tries was that I used a joystick to controll the camera movement. I changed the speed of the movement inside the SimpleBGC – I used the lowest value I can type there. You should be able to do that in any gimbal with a joystick. It should be really slow, otherwise there would be jumps in the final video instead of smooth transitions. I mounted the joystick to the handle and just started walking!

Of course you’ve got to be carefull and move your camera very slowly. I’ve got a 2 axis joystick. Sometimes, especially in gloves, I was accidentally tilting the camera. Of course it’s possible to do a smooth slow tilt in this kind of timelapse. If you don’t want to tilt the camera at all – just turn of the pitch axis for joystick. It would be just easier 😉

That would be all, the basic thechnique I’ve described in the full tutorial 😉 Let me know in the comments if you have tried the Gimbal hyperlapse technique and share the results in the Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/timelapse.hyperlapse/ . See you next week!

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