I have been experimenting with time lapse photography for a while and decided to build a motorised slider for motion time lapse shots. The idea is that while you are doing a time lapse sequence of photos you are also slowly pulling the camera along a rail so that when the images are played back you have a time lapse view from a moving position. I bought and intervalometer for my SLR that just triggers the camera to shoot a set intervals and a Opteka camera slider rail. The camera needs to be pulled at a slow rate along the rail perhaps 1 or 2 RPM so I used two Tamiya Planetary Gearbox kits together to step this 9000 rpm motor down to 1 rpm with a huge amount of torque – powered by 2 AA batteries. The whole unit sits in a wooden frame I made to keep the tension between parts. The Camera is fixed to the slider with a ball head mount and the motor slowly pulls the camera down the slider with fishing line wound to a spool on the end of the drive shaft. Camera is used in full manual mode – with white balance NOT set to auto. When the collection of shots are played back as video at a normal frame rate you get the benefits of SLR lenses – particularly depth of field as video. I am using Apple Motion 5 to construct the videos at full 1080p.

Here is my first videos from the rig in the garden at home – day 01