12 Hours at Ribblehead Viaduct

[Paramount]

I spent last night at Ribblehead Viaduct in the Yorkshire Dales shooting another "Holy Grail" time lapse, this time I wanted to go all the way and shoot a time lapse that went from day to night and then back to day again. The weather forecast wasn't brilliant but sometimes you've just got to go out and do it and hope for the best. Although the majority of the night was cloud bound there were a few short clear spells and I managed to get the milky way crossing the sky albeit behind some clouds.I started at about 7pm (an hour before sunset) and finished at 7am (an hour after sunrise). I used my Sony A7Sii and Samyang 24mm f1.4 lens, my Dynamic Perception slider with Sapphire Pro pan and tilt head and NMX pro controller for the camera movement and my Timelapse+ view intervalometer for handling the ramping of the exposures needed during the night. As mentioned on a previous post you programme the camera movement into the NMX controller via a blue tooth phone app and then after taking a correctly exposed image at ISO 100 and f1.4 you set a few parameters into the intervalometer such as longest exposure and highest ISO and then the intervalometer makes the necessary exposure adjustments during the night and also moves the slider after each exposure so apart from periodically checking on batteries, cables, etc it is nicely automated, any flickering from the exposure changes is handled using a plug in for Lightroom from Timelapse+. In all I took 1,830 images with exposures ranging from 1/2500 of a second at f1.4 and ISO 100 to 20 seconds at f1.4 and ISO 6400. That is over 21 stops of exposure difference during the night and each exposure change is made in 1/3 stop increments so the intervalometer has a fairly busy time during the night. During the night the moon came up which added a bit of extra illumination to the landscape.
Hope you like it, the video can be seen at the link below and is available in 4K

https://youtube.com/watch?v=dmFglty2XT8&t=11s

Best wishes
Gordon

[JA]

Very enjoyable. Thanks Gordon :thumbsup:

Best
JA

[Terry B]

Very nice.
How do you stop dew on the lens?

[Sunfish]

Remarkable. Day and night exposures. Never mind the dew. A day with no rain in Yorkshire.

[Paramount]

Hi Terry
I use a dew heater strap which I got from Amazon and I have that connected to a battery pack which keeps it going all night, I've never had a problem with dew on the lens with this
Best wishes
Gordon

[Dennis]

What a mammoth piece of work - both execution and post processing.:thumbsup:

Love it, the motion of the clouds was quite mesmerising. The day-night-day drama was quite delicious.:)

Cheers

Dennis

[Paramount]

Thanks Dennis
The processing is actually very simple and quick, the plug-in automatically creates key frames, in this case 8 of them. You just process these in Lightroom to how you want the individual key frames to be, then the plug-in automatically blends all the images in between the key frames so you get a nice smooth transition throughout all the images, you then just export them all to jpeg and render to video. What takes the time is downloading all the RAW files from the memory card to the computer and exporting to jpeg. The processing takes all of 10 minutes or so. All the processing I do in Lightroom and rendering to video in Premier pro. I got home at 12:30pm yesterday from my night out, I started downloading at 12:45pm and the completed video as you see it here was ready at 2:15pm
Best wishes
Gordon

[Hemi]

Very nice, time lapse clouds are always amazing... the milky above them and glimpsed, was fantastic videography, added real drama between terrestrial and celestial.

Well done....again!

Hemi

[Jeff]

Beautifully done Gordon … the dales, viaduct, clouds, stars, animals, music, and slow panning. Thanks for sharing.