Sequence: My first time-lapse

The Central Missouri Food Bank in Columbia, Mo., moves about 22 million pounds of food to 145 agencies in a year. Here, we see staff unloading food, moving food and loading food over a four-hour period Thursday, Jan. 28, 2010.

This was my first attempt at time-lapse photography. I used the internal intervelometer in the Nikon D3: ISO 3200, f8, 1/60, AWB. There's no story arch, but I learned a lot through the process! Mike DeSantis, the marketing director for the food bank, is also a professional photographer -- he lent me a head and a clamp. I chose the location and perspective, then he helped me secure my camera on a high shelf. He also talked me through my choices of aperture and shutter speed as I set the frame.

I made 600 frames, one every 30 seconds for four hours. When I pulled all the photos into Bridge, I realize all of them were slightly crooked. So I refreshed myself on creating Actions in PS and learned how to do Batch Actions in order to tilt, crop and resize the large chunk of frames.

I then pulled them all into Quicktime Pro, which creates an easy-peesy .mov file. I pulled that into FCP, added a couple freeze frames, a fade in and a fade out. Then I compressed it as a smaller .mov. The result you see here.

Plan to add public-domain music and allow the food bank to use this on its own site.