Timelapse photography is so spectacular way of taking pictures that it drives many travel and landscape photographers to study the secrets of the technique. Once they discover how laborious it is, how much time it requires and what kind of equipment is needed, many simply forget it. French startup Enlaps has created a solution for anyone who wants to become a timelapse photographer. Enlaps has developed an integrated solution that consists of a camera, cloud photo storage and a timelapse video creation application.
Enlaps has a working prototype camera and cloud software solution that they can demonstrate. They have already won a design award and an innovation award for the timelapse system. The product should be available in August 2016, because the startup still needs money to start production o f the special camera they have created.
Enlaps expects the price of the product to be around 600 Euros once it reaches production. Before it happens, they sell the product at lower early-bird price at Kickstarter.
Here is how the Enlaps dedicated timelapse photography system works:
1. Place the camera (known as Tikee) at a spot you want to photograph. Turn the solar panel towards the sun for keeping the camera powered. Tikee has two wide area lenses in the corners that must face the subject.
2. Connect the Tikee camera to a Wi-Fi hotspot (for instance, your smartphone), or if you have the Pro edition of the camera, you can connect it directly to the mobile data network (3G or 4G).
3. The camera starts transmitting images to your cloud storage at given interval.
4. Logon to your cloud account and make sure pictures show the subject that you expected.
5. Once you have received enough photos to your cloud storage, you can let the cloud app create a timelapse video for you. You can edit and select photos before you create a video.
Here is a video where Enlaps co-founder explains how the system works:
The Tikee camera can function without sunlight and without Internet for awhile. Its built-in battery should last for one week if it takes a photo every 10 minutes. An SD memory card can store photos instead of sending them to the cloud storage.
The camera specifications:
– 2 image sensors and 2 lenses.
– 16 megapixels per sensor.
– F2.8 wide angle lenses.
– Field of view 220 degrees after images have been (automatically) stitched together.
– Weatherproof.
– Operating temperature -10 – +45 Celsius.