Underwater Time-Lapse Photography

Time-lapse photography is a very interesting format to make visible dynamics happening in our environment on a different timescale.
Time-lapse is very popular in making visible the weather evolution in a scenic landscape, or to show the business of an urban scene of city life. While already on land it is relatively difficult to correctly orchestrate a time-lapse capture this is by orders of magnitude more difficult when trying to capture underwater sceneries.

Here are some examples found at the Vimeo archive. Some of them are very interesting artistic productions.


Underwater Time-Lapse Tests from Alexander Mustard on Vimeo.


Underwater Time Lapse Test from Alexander Thornton on Vimeo.


Underwater Timelapse Full HD (Dolby 5.1) from EnriqueDM on Vimeo.

Gadgets for controlling time-lapse photography

Time-lapse photography is a technique whereby the frequency at which film frames are captured is much lower than that used to view the sequence (Wikipedia).

The holy grail of time-lapse photography are landscape sequences during day to night transitions. Difficulty is to adapt correctly exposure going from bright day light to darkness, moon light, or artificial light.

There are a number of gadgets to support producing time-lapse photography sequences. Here, two recent exciting examples.

Alpine Labs: Gadgets for controlling time-lapse photography. Radian is an entire system to not only control the camera during capture of a time-lapse sequence but also to introduce motion in the sequence.


Pico: a small and simple time-lapse trigger which can be programmed using a smartphone and connect easily to your camera.