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Micheal Rissi (http://www.magictimelapse.ch/v2/en/index.htm)

I have come across Micheal Rissi through short research on time lapse.

There are some interesting Q&A on his video:

Q : So Michael, your HD time lapse photography is stunning. What cameras are you shooting with to bring this imagery to life?

MICHAEL: I have a Canon 400D (Digital Rebel XTi) and since 2009 also a Canon 50D. I was a little afraid that after around 200k shutters, the 400D’s shutter might fail at any unfavorable time… As lenses I have the wide angle Sigma 10-20 and the Sigma 17-70.

Q: What is your approach to framing and exposing your time lapse photos?

MICHEAL: I like wide angles a lot, as I shoot mostly landscapes. But as in landscape photography, finding the right subject is not trivial, people (me as well) tend to try to fit to much onto their images. Wide angles, however, allow in the post production smooth pans and zooms.

Q: What software applications are part of your toolkit to produce these HD time lapses?

MICHEAL: I always shoot in raw (or sraw), with the result that I filled a 1TB disk in about 3-4 months… Usually, I use Adobe’s Camera Raw for the raw images, or directly photomatix when I create an HDR time lapse and then tone mapping with Photomatix. After camera raw/photomatix I rerun the images through Photoshop to correct the colors, remove dust spots if necessary, apply a tone curve or in case of winter time lapses, I also “whiten” the snow slightly. Then I save all images as jpgs and import them into Adobe Premiere Elements (the poor man’s solution).

The most important filter is the deflicker plugin (gbdeflicker). Flickering is a big issue in digital time lapses, especially for HDR processing. I save the movie as quicktime with H.264 1920×1080p. Apple somehow has another definition for the gamma value, so I correct this with Quick Time Pro (explained here)

Q: How did you achieve such smooth zooms and pans? It looks like you do this in post from where I sit, am I correct?

MICHEAL: The zooms and pans are done in post with Premiere Elements. That’s why I usually shoot with the wide angle

His blog (http://magictimelapse.blogspot.com/) have a lot showcase of his latest video as well as a lot tutorials and tips on how to etc.

his creations:

Zurich:

Tilt shift? (from Erik West)

HDR

Winterreise (HDR time lapse): fog in winter from Michael Rissi on Vimeo.

Other collection of his series:

http://vimeo.com/michaelrissi/videos