Trans Siberian Timelapse from The Busking Project on Vimeo.
Making a timelapse video isn’t that hard, normally. You set a camera on a tripod, turn it on, edit the settings, then leave it alone until it’s finished.
This doesn’t work when you’re travelling on a train at 60km/h on a foggy day from polluted Beijing towards the Gobi Desert — shakes, filth, water and dust. Every time we went through a tunnel carbon dust from the train’s engine would flood the air. And in normal air there was enough pollution to mess up the lens quickly. That’s the stuff people who live there breathe every day!
PREP
We had to tape the tripod to the inside of the train (with the camera pointing out through a window), and the computer, too — the USB cable we were going to link between the two wasn’t long enough to reach the floor. Then we had to tape every nook and cranny of the camera itself, because it was horrible outside. We used two ND filters to dim the exposure (it’s like putting sunglasses on a camera), a UV filter to protect the ND filters (the UV filter is much cheaper), and tape around them to make sure the gaps were sealed. The buttons were taped, the internal camera mics were taped, and we were ready.
SETTINGS/EQUIPMENT
Canon 550d (Rebel t2i in the USA)
24-105mm f/4 EF lens
An ND4 and an ND8 filter, plus one UV filter
1 second exposure, 200 iso, f/6, 5 second delay
1 laptop
1 tripod
A lot of electrical tape
We took a total of around 5,000 photos
FAIL
We failed all day. I stayed up all night working, and Chris and Belle had to get up really early to meet me at the park, where three people had told me there would be a mass of middle-aged Chinese people dancing, singing, juggling and doing acrobatics to wake up in the morning. Needless to say, there weren’t.
Second, the conditions were terrible for a timelapse, both outside and inside the train. There was blanket cloud cover, pollution in the air, whisps of fog and dust, and basically very little contrast to the shots. The train wasn’t ideal either: the corridor was too narrow, meaning every person who passed the tripod had a chance of knocking it (two people did). There was no nearby socket, so we had to switch computers halfway through. And, worst of all, the lenses kept getting dirty (duh).
It was my stupid idea to do it in the first place, so, while the others caught up on some z’s, for the first three hours, I had to tiptoe every five seconds to wipe the latest batch of filth off of the lens. 3 hours is 2100 photos, 2100 wipes. Without sleep.
By the end of the 7 hour marathon, my arm was coated in a fine red dust, and anything not covered by tape on the camera was filthy. I was worried we might have broken it (we didn’t). The result is the above film. Considering what we went through, I’m not sure it was worth it!
Live and learn…
