Night DLSR Timelapse

[Tom Lowe]

I shot this in Joshua Tree last night. Nearly a full moon, which rose at 5PM and set at 4AM. Canon 350D DLSR, 14mm, f/5, ISO 400, 30-second exposures.

 

720p (42MB)

 

http://www.timescapes.org/spire720.mov

 

1080p (64MB)

 

http://www.timescapes.org/spire1080.mov

[Adrian Sierkowski]

That looks fantastic. Reminds me a good deal of Baraka towards the end, especially as the music for it is very similar

[Tom Lowe]

That looks fantastic. Reminds me a good deal of Baraka towards the end, especially as the music for it is very similar

 

Yeah it's from the same composer, Michael Stearns. Baraka is one of the main influences that got me interested in timelapse.

[Michael Nash]

What's to critique, it looks great!

 

I guess it does beg the question though, when you're doing something like this that's outside the realm of normal human experience, how do you want to use familiar visual cues to control how real or surreal it appears?

 

For example, the exposure is too bright to look like nighttime and too dark to look like daytime, and ends up looking artificial or unreal. Same thing with the color temperature; to appear like night it would need to be bluer (even though we know moonlight is daylight balanced), yet it's too dark to look like daytime, and ends up looking odd. Imagine what the effect might be like if it was exposed and balanced for a convincing nighttime or daytime look. Or, you might like it all looking unfamiliar and un-relatable. Just something to think about.

 

How did you determine exposure?

[Tom Lowe]

What's to critique, it looks great!

 

I guess it does beg the question though, when you're doing something like this that's outside the realm of normal human experience, how do you want to use familiar visual cues to control how real or surreal it appears?

 

For example, the exposure is too bright to look like nighttime and too dark to look like daytime, and ends up looking artificial or unreal. Same thing with the color temperature; to appear like night it would need to be bluer (even though we know moonlight is daylight balanced), yet it's too dark to look like daytime, and ends up looking odd. Imagine what the effect might be like if it was exposed and balanced for a convincing nighttime or daytime look. Or, you might like it all looking unfamiliar and un-relatable. Just something to think about.

 

How did you determine exposure?

 

 

I took down the exposure and temp for that frame above. That's the beauty of shooting RAW. You can keep trying new and better stuff.

 

For exposure, I usually just try out different bulb settings and take some test shots. Then once I'm happy with the exposure I see on the LCD, I start the timelapse. I've done enough of these now that I can guess in advance the ballpark ISO/iris/shutter settings, depending on how much moonlight there is.

[Jason Debus]

14mm, f/5, ISO 400, 30-second exposures.

 

30 seconds is kind of long, the stars motion blur is a little bit too much for my taste. Is your lens fast enough to do 10 second exposures? Otherwise looks great!

[Tom Lowe]

30 seconds is kind of long, the stars motion blur is a little bit too much for my taste. Is your lens fast enough to do 10 second exposures? Otherwise looks great!

 

10 seconds? I don't think so. My lens can go to f/3.5. Maybe if I went f/3.5 and ISO 800 I could speed it up quite a bit, but I'm not sure if the image would get noisy. I'll test it out under similar lighting (moon) conditions one of these days.