Time-lapse set-up

Set-up

It is important to know what you want to shoot, and how you want it to look like. Find your subject and a proper foreground and background. If you want to shoot a blooming flower, be aware of the background: you will like it to be blurry, or black, to focus the attention to the flower and not to the background. For northern lights, you want to have the sky as the main subject, but some landscape foreground is also an important factor: mountains, lakes, rivers. A road, for example, would not be the best idea; cars passing by would affect the overall result. 

It is also important to keep the camera steady, or if you plan to move it during the shoot (and make a moving time-lapse), keep in mind how many frames per second are you going to use and move the camera with a speed that fits with the parameters.