After dark

Ben Egbert

Ben Egbert

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I got the idea to do a night timelapse from my back deck. I was hoping for more clouds, but there was about 1/8 moon last night to make the snowclad mountain stand out pretty good.

I had tried this the night before but did not have all the settings worked out. This is 5 sec exposures with 1 second intervals in time interval setting. Shot with the Canon R5 in raw at 105mm f4. 513 images, 23.5 gb. 1.93 gb final mp4 size. ISO1600. I did not need to set auto iso because the light was already as dark as it would get.

I opened these in Photoshop and batch processed them using ACR filter. I did some NR and clarity and dehaze along with minor tweaks to exposure, black, light and shadows. Saved as Tiff

I assembled the tiff files in Movavi and added titles, music and exported as 4k. The 4k will probably not be available until tomorrow. More stars show up in 4 k.

I did not like the WB so I opened the rendered file in photoshop and tweaked the wb. You will see the difference between my opening and closing frames compared to the video.

This came out about like I expected except there is flicker because of being shot as a time interval series. The internal time lapse does not allow a long enough shutter speed (1/8 max). I shot one in this mode the night before, but had to go to ISO12800, It came out better than expected. I may try one with a faster lens. I have the 24-70 f2.8 I could use, but 70 mm requires a lot of cropping.

I may need to look into LRT.

 
AlanLichty

AlanLichty

Moderator
Very nice. I like the motion of the stars over the Wasatch peaks.

Looks like you have east winds blowing with the snow plumes coming off of the mountain ridges. Are you exposed to any of the canyon winds where you live? When my wife and I lived in Sugarhouse we were directly downwind from the mouth of Emigration Canyon and when the weather set up like this we would get howling winds at our house with all of the accompanying joys of the polar air over Wyoming. Lurking outside during those episodes was best described as character building.
 
Ben Egbert

Ben Egbert

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Alan, thanks for looking. We are in the lee of Timpanogos about midway between American Fork and Provo Canyon. We get wind, but nothing like what I find in the canyons.
 
JimFox

JimFox

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Hey Ben,

This sure turned out really well. I like the look you got in it, the stars look great and the mountain is lit up perfectly.

Remember, just use a plain old $20 Remote Release and lock in the shutter if you are shooting at night. Then there is no 1 second gaps. That's what I do.

Now I do see a lot of flickering in this. I saw you said you didn't have Auto-Iso on, and that's good because as you said, the sky was now dark and the exposure wasn't going to change. You were in complete manual then? Because I don't know why the exposure was constantly changing. Maybe I am being too picky, and maybe others won't see it, but I see the flickering.
 
Ben Egbert

Ben Egbert

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Jim, this convinced me that in camera is the way to go. I just wish I could get longer shutters than 1/8. I think the flicker is the result of slightly different shutter speeds between shots. Canon must have incorporated exposure smoothing in the video mode but not time interval mode. I am still exploring LRT which has a smoothing feature.

Do you see any bad effect from the 1 second interval?

I went out last night to Utah Lake for another star circle and of course a TL sunset. The sunset came out ok but I did not stay for the star show because in spite of weather reports the sky was covered with clouds.

I am not that interested in night TL at this time. I want to concentrate on milky way and golden hour TL.
 
Jameel Hyder

Jameel Hyder

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Here is an approach to try. Shoot in full manual incl ISO i.e. nothing is changing between the individual shots. Go for a alower shutter - slower the better. If needed use a ND filter to slow it down. If the light is changing fast as in sunset or sunrise this approach will result in things going dark or bright. In this case aperture priority again with a slow shutter.

The idea here is that light changes due to clouds moving over the sun for example are smoothed out to some extent.

The holy grail of course is software like LRTimelapse to smooth things out.
 
JimFox

JimFox

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Staff member
Ben, here is my setup going forward.

During the day and for Sunsets - in camera timelapse. Shutter priority, no Auto Iso. I let the aperture change. (Both cameras have exposure smoothing)

At night, no matter stars or Milky Way - individual images that I will stack later. Full manual. 20 to 30 sec shutter, etc. normal night time shooting settings.


You can’t beat the in camera for during the day and at sunset. Look at my Victoria Tower, it transitioned perfectly well at the end of the sunset.

But at night once the stars are out? I want the power and control of individual images. Forget about Interval settings, just start shooting like we practiced in Utah. Get your shutter speed set up to 20 to 30 secs, f2.8 and ISO 800 to 3200, whatever gets you the correct exposure. Then lock in your Remote Release and let it run. No intervals between images, the stars will jump. Just lock in the Remote while shooting in full Manual.
 
Ben Egbert

Ben Egbert

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Staff member
Ok, Jim. I have been having good luck with auto iso. With shutter priority, I could run out of aperture as it gets dark. Aperture priority might work as it would just keep using longer shutters but will end at 1/8 second. Iso has no limit.

I will see if I can run my camera with a locked remote, I can test this I think with my old manual remote. But you still have write time between shots.
 
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