I’ve recently taken an interest in time-lapse photography. It’s a fun and easy aspect of photography to get involved with, and it has the potential to produce some interesting results. Plus, you don’t need a high-end camera to produce quality video: it only takes 1.6 megapixels (1440 x 1080) to assemble an HD-quality output file, which is available nowadays on many phone cameras.

I had a spare digital camera from 2001 handy: the RCA CDS6300, a 2.3 megapixel camera which is a real piece of junk. Mine has a broken battery door. On the plus side, it came with an AC adapter. So I built an intervalometer based on a 555 timer from a guide on Instructables. In the process of hacking the camera to attach the timer, I broke most of the inputs, so that it can now only be used to take time-lapse photos. It shoots 650+ images to a 256mb CF card as JPEG images, and then a bit of free software can be used to assemble these into a “motion JPEG” AVI video file (and add soundtrack if desired).

Despite the fragile build quality of the intervalometer, the mostly non-functional camera, and low quality still images – the resulting video still looks great. Here are a couple of sample videos.