Hyperlapse Photography: Pushing Boundaries with Instagram

1. Introduction: My name's Dave Krugman. I'm the social editor at BBDO. I do a lot of stuff on Instagram as well. I think Instagram is really interesting because this is the first time in history where we've been able to fluidly communicate with visual information. It's leading to this whole new form of communication that it's really incredibly creative and intimate expressions and it's a great place to learn and to teach and be inspired by incredible visual content. A couple of weeks ago, Instagram actually came out with a new app. It's called Hyperlapse. It's free. It's a really easy way to make some stunning time-lapse photography. It has built-in stabilization, so when you're moving around it, it results in really smooth transitions and stuff like that. So today, we're going to approach Hyperlapse from three different angles. First one is going to be moving through the city streets, the second is going to be transportation, and the third is going to be a stationary scene where something's moving. Your project for today is to create an Instagram Hyperlapse video and share it on Instagram and Skillshare. Sharing your work with others is the best way to learn because not only will you get feedback and figure out how to do things better but you'll also get encouragement which will motivate you to create one. So, I've worked with a lot of institutions in New York to help them increase their presence on Instagram. I worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Public Library, Intrepid Museum, and most recently the American Museum of Natural History. With tools like this, we can break down the physical boundaries that some people might never get to go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in their lives. But because they have an iPhone, now they can experience the collections and the spaces through the eyes of some of the city's best photographers. So, I've been taking photos for as long as I can remember. My grandfather collected cameras, he taught my dad, they had a dark room. When I'm walking through the MET and I have a Hasselblad camera that my grandfather used to shoot with, it's just means a lot. There's probably nothing I like more than sharing what I've learned. It's an amazing experience to be able to figure out how something is done and done well and then be able to share that so other people can can make their art. Probably, the biggest benefit I brought from being a member of the Instagram communities that I've never had such immediate access to so much of inspiring material and inspiring content. It's an environment where everybody is really open and willing to share and that's just really an amazing thing because you can learn so quickly if you see. If you follow 50 really good photographers and you look at Instagram every day, you're seeing 50 incredible images and observing is educating yourself, so I think that's the most inspiring thing about Instagram. I thought now is the perfect time to kind of teach a class about Hyperlapse because a lot of people have this new app and might not know how to use it. So that's why I'm so excited to be teaching the Hyperlapse class for Skillshare. So, there's a million different ways to create a hyperlapse. So, it's important to just let your creativity run wild. All right. To get started on Hyperlapse, the first thing you wanna do is turn your phone on airplane mode so that if anybody calls you, or texts you, or you got any notifications, it doesn't interrupt to your time-lapse. So then, we're gonna open up Hyperlapse. Now, as when you compose and frame your shot, when you're ready to shoot your video, you hit this middle rainbow button and let record for as long as necessary. When you're done, you stop recording, and then you have the option to switch the speed. I'd say that two times works really well for street stuff all the way up to 12 times if you do a really long time lapse from a stationary position. When you're done, you hit the check mark, it saves your video and now you can share it to Facebook or Instagram or you can save it directly to your camera roll, which is actually automatic. 2. Capturing the City Street: This section of the class is all about capturing the energy of New York City streets or any street bustling scene with the Hyperlapse app. What's great about that is that it smooths out movement, and also speeds up time. So, you get to see the world, in a way, that normally isn't possible. Decided to shoot today in Chinatown, just because Chinatown on a Saturday is always bustling, it's busy, there's always interesting things to see. The first step to doing a good street photography Hyperlapse, is finding an area that is populated or bustling, or busy, or anywhere that has a lot of movement and people in interesting sites. You never really know you're going to get until you until you see it, so that's the whole point of it. You just got to make sure that there's enough around you, that you can get some good results. I'm going to walk down the street here, and get a time-lapse of the hustle and bustle of this street. All right, here we go. Since Hyperlapse has built-in stabilization, you really don't have to worry about movements from walking, or bumps and jitters, and stuff like that, because it will smooth that all out and you get this really fluid video after you're done. I like the energy of the city, and how you can just draw attention to certain things by holding time on them. After the fact, you can change the speed. Go from anywhere from normal speed, just cool, smooth look. Double speed goes a little faster, four times even faster, all the way up eight. Eight has this chaotic vibe to it, but if you go all the way back to two times, it's just super smooth because Hyperlapse has built-in stabilization. So, you see here I'm just holding this with my hand, and it's pretty smooth, and you get these streamlines. Look. If the movements' too fast, then it helps to dial it back a little bit. Things to keep in mind when doing a street Hyperlapse, it's good to change your angle a lot because you get these really fluid transitions that look really cool. Another thing is that if you want to emphasize a certain moment, you can pause and by extending the amount of time that you point at something, it draws more emphasis to that particular moment. That's a really neat trick, too. It's good to weave in and out of crowds, and get close to people, and get some really interesting angles. The variable speeds are really interesting for Hyperlapse and for street, the best way to do it is to do with slower speed, like three times, two times normal. Now, I'll either I'll keep my camera low, or I'll make it look like I'm not filming or something like that. People do notice, but since everybody has smart phones out these days, I've never had anybody speak to me about it. 3. Showcase Moving Through Space: Another way I really like to shoot hyperlapse is from a moving train because you can get some really incredible footage if you're moving and everything else is stationary. So, we're going to try that on the way to Brooklyn right now. The first step in this process is to determine what kind of transportation you're going to shoot from. You could do this from a friend's car while they're driving, you could do it from a skateboard or bike. In New York, I like to do trains because it also goes through so many different areas and neighborhoods that it's really interesting. So, I'm pressing the phone up to the glass in order to stabilize it and to reduce the reflection. If the camera's right up against the window, then there's no way that light can get in and cause a reflection. When you're shooting time-lapse from transportation, it's really important to think about perspective. So, if you're shooting through the side, you're going to get these incredible scenes flying by at a really fast rate. If you're shooting forwards, you're going to get really interesting perspective shots. It's kind of look like you're zooming into a scene. So, before you get started, determine what you want your result to be and then that will help inform which direction you should shoot in. It's a nice thing to keep your video long enough so that you can play with the speeds later on. There's so much variability. You could go four times as fast all the way up to 12 times as fast. So, make sure that you're shooting enough footage that you can have that flexibility when you go into process later. So, I like the transition from still to moving, so I always start my hyperlapses from transportation, before the transportation is actually moving. That's a way to kind of get this really cool transition from a still shot going into movement, and maybe all the way back to a still shot again when the train stops. If you're shooting this from a taxi, the same thing applies. Just try to get as much footage as possible so that you have more flexibility in the end. I think a good practical length to shoot for is about six times the length of your final video because that's kind of the middle of the hyperlapse speed adjustments, so you have a lot of flexibility on either ends if you'd shoot six times the length of what you want to end up with. 4. Shooting a Single Location: So the third way I like to do hyperlapse is from a stationary position, and it really helps to have a tripod. You want to pick a scene that has some movement as well as things that are standing still so you can see the juxtaposition between those two. So right now, we're down by the East River with the Manhattan skyline in the background, which is a great spot to do this. Anything where there's a grand scene, where there's some movement happening like a sunset down by a lake, a city center, anywhere where you can set up and have at least 10 minutes to record, you'll get a good hyperlapse from that. So when you're shooting from a stationary position, you have an opportunity to take a little bit more time and put a little more thought into your composition. So think about things like rule of thirds, or what angle you're shooting at, or elements of balance in the frame. Whereas, in the other hyperlapse, if we're moving around a lot, we didn't get a lot of control, here we can control the scene that can really help the end result. When I'm shooting stationary hyperlapses, I'd really like to use this little tripod. This is from JOBY. This holds your phone and then this bend, you can bend them around anything. I just put this around this fence right here to do the time-lapse here. If you don't have one of this, there's a lot of different ways you can do this. You can place your phone against something. I've seen people take their shoe off, put their phone in their shoe where their feet would go, and that holds it steady enough, or you can just rest it on something as well. So right now, we're down by the East River State Park. I chose this area because it has a really epic view and there's also a lot of movement in the foreground. There's boats going by, there's helicopters flying in and out. So when you're choosing this scene to shoot stationary, you want to think a lot about what you're going to film, and make sure it's something that's maybe a stunning scene or something like that but has a lot of movement as well as stationary things. So the stationary thing here is the skyline which isn't moving, and we get this beautiful contrast when boats come by and the waves are crashing over the rocks. You could do this really anywhere where there's movement but imagine a bustling city center. You could do this down by the beach, you could be by a pond, you could film a sunset. You could film from the overpass of a highway and get the traffic rushing in and out. You could film at a train station and see the energy of that portion. Anywhere that has movement where you have enough room to set up a still shot I think would work. I generally do hyperlapse in landscape mode because I just think that the aspect ratio is way better than a vertical video, and I just think it's easier to compose that way. So rule of thirds is just that things look better if they're balanced and divided into thirds. So what I'm going to do here is I'll put the skyline on the bottom third or on the top third, and then the movement that's happening will probably be in the foreground where the waves are crashing over the rocks. Once you have your shot composed and framed and set up, all you really need to do now is hit record and wait. The longer you record, the more flexibility you'll have with speed. I would recommend this one, maybe recording for 10 or 15 minutes, and putting it all the way up to times 12 because you'll get some really incredible movements and stuff over time. 5. Explore Photo Classes on Skillshare: