Shooting a Time-Lapse Video

In this lesson on Photography with the Camera app on the iPhone we look at how we shoot a time-lapse video using the Camera app on the iPhone.

Time-Lapse
To switch over to Time-Lapse, just swipe to the right across your preview until you see Time-Lapse. To take a time-lapse video, you just press the shutter button, just like you do in a standard video. Your iPhone will start taking a time-lapse video. You’ll see the shutter changes and it indicated that it is taking the video.

How does the Time-Lapse Work?
So when you are taking a time-lapse vide, what is the iPhone actually doing? According to Apple it is snapping photos at a dynamically selected interval. This interval is something we cannot change, your iPhone is dynamically changing it depending on the length.

What does this mean exactly? If your video is shorter, the Camera app will shoot about 2 frames a second. If it’s a bit longer, say 20 minutes, it will shoot a frame every 2 seconds. Again, we do not have any control in this. All we can do is start and stop the video.

So that’s all we have to do to shoot a time-lapse video with the camera app on the iphone.

See this lesson in Action
If you want to see how this works in action, I show you how this all works in the video above.

Download Tutorial
If you’d like to download this tutorial, you can find it in the iBook Store. You can also join the site and download the tutorial.