Last night (5/6/2011) I jumped in the car and cruised to downtown Petoskey with a plan to shoot some time lapse shots on Mitchell Street.  It was about 9:25p.m when i started shooting so the lighting was perfect, dark enough get good trails from passing cars and just enough natural light left in the sky to illuminate my frame.

Time lapse photos can be powerful images when shot correctly.  People have different tastes when it comes to digesting images so I'll let you know what I look for in a good lapse shot.

1. Light. It needs to be well balanced.  evenly spread 

throughout your frame.  

2. Proper exposure to bring out colors.

3. Action.  Time lapse photos can be tricky depending

on how long you choose to leave your shutter open.

Choosing the right amount of action to have with-in

say a 3 second exposure is vital as too much action 

will clutter your frame and too little will leave the photo lacking.

This is my favorite shot from last night! 

To me this is an ideal time lapse shot.  The right 

half of the photo has little action, giving it a crisp

exposure.  The left is full of action, giving it depth

and showing of its colors.  Then, focused right in the 

middle is this bench. Sitting strong as a focal point,

tying the shot together.

Here are specs!

Canon 60d shooting .RAW. Sigma 10-20mm ex lens @ 14mm.

(shutter = 10 seconds, f/9.0, ISO= 160)

I used Adobe's Camera Raw program to process the 

the .RAW file and perform some quick touch up.

Below are a few other pics that caught my eye! 

This is my 2nd favorite shot!

The Crooked Tree Arts Center building is just flat 

out beautiful to begin with, so taking a bad photo of

it is kind of hard to do.

After shooting last night I have developed a few more ideas that I'm going to try and shoot in the next couple weeks.  I want to do a 4 angle photo illustration from directly under a stop light looking directly down the center of each adjoining road.  Kind of a look into perception.