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Day-to-Night Timelapse

Lesson 16 from: Capturing Change Timelapse Workshop

Colin Delehanty

Day-to-Night Timelapse

Lesson 16 from: Capturing Change Timelapse Workshop

Colin Delehanty

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Lesson Info

16. Day-to-Night Timelapse

Perhaps the hardest time-lapses of all- the day-to-night transition. Colin shares his approach and recipe to making a day-to-night lapse.

Lesson Info

Day-to-Night Timelapse

(invigorating tone) Okay, so now we're gonna go over how to capture a day and night or night to day time lapse. We're gonna do this using the view and this tool is gonna allow us to change our settings for a camera over such a long period of time and do that automatically. So this is a great tool for that. And I'm just gonna point out something important when you're using this tool. Make sure that you have GPS module enabled so that will be able to pull any data that it can use to ramp the settings for your time lapse based on your current location. And you have to be outside for that to work. So once you got that turned on, you can start working with your time lapse. So right now we're communicating with the camera through this USB cable. So we're plugged into our camera right here and we have the view plugged in through its USB port and we can start managing our time lapse settings. So we're gonna have time lapse mode set to auto. We can use a basic fixed time lapse where a time la...

pse that you would be more familiar with with no changes, or we can do auto ramping so we want that set up. Interval mode. We want either fixed length or auto variable or external auxiliary. And so we're gonna use auto variable for this setting. Now, this is the two settings that you're gonna use for determining the interval between when the shot is during the day and when the shot is during the night. So right now we're gonna use a shutter speed on our camera for the nighttime portion of 15 seconds. So the shutter's gonna be open for 15 seconds and the interval at nighttime will be 18 seconds and the view will determine when it is night and when it is day and it will ramp between the two and so it's ramping between 18 second interval and a six second interval. So as it changes the shutter speed, it'll also change the interval and this'll make sure that the shutter speed is always less than the interval. So six seconds is good for daytime. It'll help capture the detail that happens within the short period of time of a sunset or a sunrise. And 18 seconds is gonna be good for us because we're gonna be able to capture all the detail at night with that longer exposure shutter. We have ramping options and recommended by Time Lapse Plus, who makes the view, is to use a night exposure of negative one stop. So we're gonna use that recommended setting cause it's worked pretty well for me and we're gonna choose the ramping algorithm. So when you capture a time lapse where the settings are being changed over time, when you bring this into your computer you're gonna need to smooth that all out. Cause when you look at the exposure, it's gonna constantly go up or go down and it's gonna do that in like a stepping form. So in order to smooth that out so it's not stepping down or stepping up, we're gonna use LR Time Lapse is the program to do that and we need to tell the view to use LR Time Lapse as the ramping algorithm for this time lapse. Now we're gonna set our max and min ISO. So at nighttime we're gonna use ISO 4,000. That's pretty good for the nighttime portion. And for the daytime portion, we're gonna use a minimum ISO of because we're gonna have a lot more light and we're not gonna need to have the ISO so low. This is gonna vary. You need to have an idea of how dark and how bright your setting is gonna be between different times of the day. And in the past I've shot the night sky with those settings that I thought worked, but then some clouds rolled in and my landscape was a lot darker than I thought it would be. So I might have been better off by setting an ISO higher than 4, so I can capture more light when it was not as available. So keep that in mind. Think about those settings and what it will look like in the future when you're setting your ISO. Max shutter. We don't want the shutter speed on our camera to be any higher than 15 seconds because right now it's middle of the night and we have 15 seconds as our shutter speed, we don't want that to go any longer. So we're gonna say 15 seconds for our max shutter length. The ramping parameters. So when this is ramping exposures, it's gonna ramp the shutter speed. It's also gonna ramp the ISO. We've set the max and min shutter speed, the max and min ISO and this is telling the view to ramp those settings and if we were to change it to something else, it would give us more options but we're just gonna stick with those two settings. So we're gonna go ahead and go up to... Start. Which is gonna allow us to start this time lapse. And when I hit this button, it's gonna bring up a screen that will show me the progress of the time lapse and give me a bunch of information. And when I wave my hand in front of the view, it'll allow me to see that information, but this this device will idle if I don't interact with it at all for a certain period of time. So we're gonna hit go. You can see the progress. It's capturing one shot and you can see that the interval is 18 seconds and it's almost at the end of that interval. The red line here is indicating the time that the shutter's open. Now it's on the blue part of the line, which is indicating the remainder of the shot where the shutter is not open. Okay so now we're just gonna monitor the shot and make sure that everything looks good. So this is the type of time lapse where you're probably gonna leave your camera for in a one place for a long period of time and so you might want to think about how long you want to be out there and whether or not you can leave your camera alone by itself. And if you are gonna leave your camera alone by itself, you should put rain protection over it if you think there's any potential for a rainstorm coming through and make sure that it's not possible that someone could pick up your camera and leave with it. So just protect your camera however you can if you're gonna leave it somewhere for that period of time. Have fun previewing it after it's all done. (invigorating tone)

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Ratings and Reviews

Ondrej Dvorak
 

I have seen tons of timelapses, but there is no other timelapse film that touches my soul as much as Project Yosemite 1 I never forget the moment when I saw Project Yosemite for the first time! That moment I knew that that’s what I wanna DO! Colin is the reason that I bought my first DSLR! Thank You Alex for getting together with my hero and make this awesome idea happen!

Bryce Lord
 

Clear and concise workshop to understand the process of Time-lapse photography Being new to this aspect of photography, I found this workshop informative and directional. If I were to give a critique, it would be regarding equipment choice for the entry level bridging to pro-level for the introductory student. Otherwise, it lays a nice foundation to build from.

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