Day and Night on La Palma – The highlights from my last La Palma holiday

On my last La Palma holiday I did lots of experiments with my X-T1 camera. This time I was especially looking into time-lapsing. The result is “Day and Night on La Palma” – a 5 minute video about this beautiful island. To me, La Palma is the perfect place for doing this kind of videos. In this short video I want to show the highlights of my last holiday. Lots of stars, clouds and sunsets… 🙂 In order to make this video I visited many different places of the island. Some of them were Roque de Los Muchachos, Mirador del Jable, Mirador del Time and Pico Birigoyo. The music title “Worlds” has been composed by Jacob Tyler. I found it on www.soundcloud.com. I hope you enjoy the video 🙂

For those who are interested in technical details:

Most of the time-lapse recordings have been taken with the Fujifilm X-T1. My self-made 12V power adaptor was sometimes quite helpful. On the camera everything was set to manual (despite a few recordings with aperture priority).

The whole time-lapse post-processing I did on Linux (parts of this tutorial I found very useful). First, I developed the RAW images from the camera using the open source tool rawtherapee. In order to reduce flickering I used this deflickering script developed by Vangelis Tasoulas to reduce the flickering. In case the recorded time-lapse was too short, I used the free open source tool slowmoVideo (developed by Simon A. Eugster) to interpolate additional frames. Finally, I used kdenlive for creating and cutting the videos. Previously I used openshot but at this point in time kdenlive seems to be more stable.

One remark regarding the Fujifilm X-T1 and time-lapse recording: Sometimes I had problems with the X-T1 when the time between the frames was too short (< 3s). It introduced random delays of up to several seconds so that the images taken were not recorded at the same interval. This resulted in videos which did not play smooth. Increasing the time between the frames resolved this problem. Probably the camera did not finish writing the previous image to the SD card. After some research I found that this is probably a fragmentation problem of the SD card. Using high quality SD cards and formatting the card prior to its usage should help in the future.

Clear skies!

Last updated: July 23, 2022 at 12:53 pm

3 Comments

  1. Hallo Herr Schmitt, sind gerade auf La Palma und durch das Para Ti auf ihr neues Video aufmerksam geworden. Super gemacht, sehr stimmungsvoll; wir haben es mit Begeisterung gesehen.
    Sonnige Grüsse von La Palma
    Monika & Günter Keller

    1. Vielen Dank! Ich freue mich über Ihr positives Feedback. La Palma ist einfach ein toller Ort. Bald werde ich auch wieder dort sein 🙂 Ich wünsche Ihnen eine gute Zeit auf der Isla Bonita. Mit besten Grüßen aus dem verregneten Böblingen. Carsten Schmitt

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