Scenes of the Southern Night, Western Australia and Chile

[colinmlegg]

Hi all,

I put together this video of night scenes from Western Australia and Chile for entry into the 2012 David Malin awards the other month. The scenes are part of a larger (and probably never ending) project to document beautiful nightscapes from the southern hemisphere.

Well I'm very happy and honoured to report that my little clip won 1st prize in the animation category. Wow!

Here's a copy I uploaded to vimeo today. Please share if you enjoy it.

https://vimeo.com/45856570


Thanks,
Colin.

ps. best viewed with sound on.

Nocturnal

[iceman]

Holy cow. That is just amazing.

One of the best I've seen. Stunning work Colin!

Congrats on the DM Award win - well deserved indeed!

[Lester]

At times like this I wish I had internet to see such events. I can only imagine how wonderful your work is Colin. Congratulations.

[dvj]

:eyepop:

[Octane]

Colin,

That was stunning. A very well-deserved win.

Beautiful cinematography, which is very inspiring.

H

[Osirisra]

Epic!

[multiweb]

That was excellent and congrats on 1st prize - well deserved. :thumbsup:

[CapturingTheNight]

Colin you just managed to leave me speechless and wrinkle my brain at the same time. :eyepop: Holy cow that was awesome. My brain still hurts from that Bungles "fisheye" sequence. Congrats on the win. Very well deserved.

[Lester]

Wow, managed to get a view of your work Colin = amazing. All the best.

[alexch]

Congrats Colin on winning the category - very well deserved indeed! You should have heard the reaction of the audience when your winning entry was playing at the awards ceremony. It's a shame we could not meet at Parkes, but there is hope for the next year.

Cheers,
Alex

[Adelastro1]

Yes I agree completely. Very very nice. Yes there were many "ooo's and ahhh's" in the audience as it was playing on the big screen!

[rogerg]

Very, very nice Colin! :thumbsup:

I am still very envious of your Ballard shots :)

As far as the timelapse goes - I would have liked a slower frame rate to enjoy each scene a bit more, and more fades rather than chops between clips. Personal taste perhaps. I feel that kind of editing could take the clip another step higher in overall quality :)

I love the colours in all the clips, you've got a nice range of blues and greens I struggle to achieve and only rarely do.

[h0ughy]

very nice - world class

[rogerg]

Oh, and I forgot to ask - is that a meteor at about 00:45 which puffs in to a "shockwave" and drifts across the image??? I've never seen anything like it before!

[colinmlegg]

Thanks ALL, really appreciate all your wonderful comments.



Thanks Mike! It's a great honour to be selected for the awards. And thanks for adding the Nightscapes forum. I just love these sort of images and it's probably the only place on the planet dedicated to them. It'll be a favourite hangout for sure.



Thanks H. Exploring the time dimension is the thing I love about timelapse. You just never know what little hidden gems are buried in all those frames. :)





Cheers Guys.



Thanks Greg. I've had a few similar comments re. the Bungles sequence. I may have to put up a warning sign - 'Do not watch this clip while operating dangerous machinery!' ;)



Thanks Lester!






Pity I wasn't there guys. Would love to have seen all the other images/animations on the large screen, especially your beautiful Aurora timelapse Alex. Maybe when I'm in Melbourne next I can request a personally showing? :)

Congrats to both of you on your wins!



Cheers Roger! Thanks for the feedback and 100% agree on the timing. I would have preferred longer sequences, but David has a 2 minute time limit and I had a few shots to show. I plan to release a longer version later with the full sequences. And yes, some of the cuts are a little harsh.



Yes, meteor train. It's the second one I've captured, but by far the best in terms of brightness and length. I got it during a continuous multi-day/night sequence last year. It covered half the sky for 12 nights, so my odds were up to capture something this rare.

[Nico13]

Colin that is outstanding and easy to see why the Malin Awards recognised it.
Thanks for showing the results of the efforts of your work. :thumbsup:

[Paul Haese]

This was stunning to watch at the awards, but I reckon what really worked was the fish eye sequence and the cloud moving over reflecting water sequence. Lovely lovely work.

[colinmlegg]

Thanks!



Thanks Paul!

[Phil Hart]

i've said as much to colin in email and another thread, but will add my high praise for this work here too. all the sequences are beautifully crafted, amazingly sharp and well executed. :thumbsup:

and the five camera system produces something incredible.. if anybody else in the world is doing it i haven't seen it.

Phil

[gregbradley]

Hi Colin,

I am about to start taking my first time lapses and I have talked to a few of the top guys already.

When you said you did multi day 12 day day/night time lapse is that with one camera? Wouldn't the memory cards fill up way before that?

You must have used a plug in power supply?

What sort of settings do you recommend?

I am thinking for my Nikon D800E, 14-24mm F2.8 at 14mm and F2.8, 30 seconds at ISO6400 which is quite clean.

Also, do you use in camera noise reduction on?

Is RAW really needed or is jpeg fine?

Post processing software is usually Lightroom 4.1?

Greg.

[colinmlegg]

Thanks Phil, appreciate the kind words. I should probably have added you in the credits. It was one of your bioluminescence images that convinced me to switch to digital and do nightscapes! :)



Hi Greg,

Good to hear. You certainly have the system to capture some top notch sequences.

>When you said you did multi day 12 day day/night time lapse is that with
>one camera? Wouldn't the memory cards fill up way before that?

5 cameras. Totally crazy thing to try in retrospect. It taught me a hell of lot though, both technically and about myself. I did it to provide the backdrop for a 'loss of the night sky' sequence for the IMAX film Outside In (now know as 'In Saturn's Rings'). They partially funded it.

I got about 97% of the sequence. 3 glitches caused loss of some day footage, all caused by faulty USB connections which blue screened the netbooks. Fortunately, the lost coverage was during clear days. The night coverage was almost complete except for loss of one camera for 2 hours.

So to your question. I swapped cards at 2 points during the day. 1 64 and 1 32 Gig card per camera. This meant stopping the system for around 3 minutes. In the final film, the day portion will be sped up and many frames blended so loss of 3 minutes won't be noticed...and most days were cloud free.

>You must have used a plug in power supply?

I used 3 solar panels each rated at 90 watt hours and 4 110 amp SLA batteries to power the system. Originally I wanted to use DC-DC adaptors, but these proved unreliable, so went DC-AC-DC with a sine wave inverter. That component performed flawlessly and provided adequate power... close to break even in terms of power in, power out. You can see the rig running at 0:34 s in the clip.

I hope to write up the whole experience when back in Perth and post it on a blog. It's taken me this long to recover from the thing to contemplate writing it up. :(

>What sort of settings do you recommend?

>I am thinking for my Nikon D800E, 14-24mm F2.8 at 14mm and F2.8, 30 >seconds at ISO6400 which is quite clean.

Sounds about right, but I'd probably reduce the ISO to 3200, or maybe 4000? Haven't seen any D800E RAWs myself so can't say how good 6400 is compared to my 5D2. I did do those tests comparing the 5D2 v 5D3 RAWs and the latter was about 1/2 a stop better.

>Also, do you use in camera noise reduction on?

Best to leave all camera noise reduction off. There are many better noise reduction options in post. I find the in camera ones are too aggressive and overly smooth the image.

>Is RAW really needed or is jpeg fine?

Ultimately RAW, but jpeg is fine for getting started. If you're planning to do a killer sequence, certainly use RAW as it will future proof the footage. With timelapse, you'll probably have a high failure rate to start with - at least I did. No point wasting disk space on the early footage.

>Post processing software is usually Lightroom 4.1?

I use After Effects and Premiere Pro, but Lightroom and LR Timelapse is a good combination to start with. If you want to do fancier stuff like time remapping and stabilization you'll probably want one of the dedicated video editing packages like Adobe AE/PP, Sony Vegas, etc.

Hope that helps and good luck.

[White Rabbit]

Truly amazing, well done.

[White Rabbit]

What gear was this taken on?

Thanks

[colinmlegg]

Canon 5D2 + a number of lens (8mm, 14-24, 24 f/1.4).

The main requirement though to get the shots was lots of travel, planning and racking up the timelapsing hours (trial and error learning).

[rcheshire]

Wonderful Colin. You deserve 1st prize for that effort.

[beren]

:thumbsup: Superb, congrats on the the DM award well deserved. Enjoyed all the visuals of the time-lapse but the scene with the Southern cross, pointers and the Magellanic clouds over the snow capped mountain beautiful :) and the Stirling ranges as well one of my favorite parts of WA.

[colinmlegg]

Thanks Rowland.



Cheers beren. The Stirlings made me wait for that shot. I think it was around July a couple of years ago and I was camped in the caravan park at the base for 4 nights of shooting. The first 3 nights were duds...grey bland cloudy skies - worst possible conditions for time lapsing. Almost left with the tail between the legs, but decided to stay on and was rewarded with those fantastic lenticular clouds.