For a long time I've been looking for a way to make a timelapse movie using my digital camera. Some cameras support this natively, but not my canon.
But luckily OS X came to the rescue!
As the cd-rom that came with the camera was lost during a battle at sea, no easy solution was at hand for my Canon 350D it seemed. Until today, when i came across the build in program 'Image Capture' and 'Automator' in Leopard. It's not that obvious to find, but when you fire up Image Capture, connect your camera using USB and go to Devices in the top menu, you will see an option Sharing. Tick the necessary boxes and make sure you camera is also ticked as shared in the main devices windows.
Next browse to http://localhost:5100/ and have fun! You can now take pictures by pressing a button on a webpage. So timelapse movies would be possible by scripting some http POSTS to the webserver, but there is an easier solution.
OS X allows you to automate tasks with 'automator'. In this case we forget about Image Capture and we fire up automator. You can set automator to take a picture from your (usb connected) camera, then pause for x seconds and loop back for x minutes. You can even set it to ouput it to a movie using quicktime.
Note well that your DSLR camera has a limited life span. For example, the Canon 350D shutter could stop functioning correctly after 50.000 pictures..
ViM