Whenever I'm up north, my favorite images to capture are the stars at night. Anyone who has followed my work before now probably knows I'm a space freak, especially when it comes to parts of the universe that I can capture on film, as evidenced here, and here, and here. But sooner or later, taking plain old shots of the sky gets boring, not to mention it involves finding new or unique places to see lit up by stars which usually means spending daylight hours scouting locations followed by a night of little or no sleep. So this time I wanted to try something a little different. I'd never done any time lapse work before, save for some b-roll video of cars driving down the highway long ago with Billy Meiklejohn, so that seemed like something new to explore. It worked out perfectly in my head as I could just set the camera on auto pilot while I slept soundly in my bed. And with the whole universe spinning through the frame, any potential viewer would be in awe of the spectacle and not think about whether I lazily set my tripod down next to my tent and pointed it straight up rather than looking for an interesting composition! That's a win-win right there!
Now being me, I still didn't wanna make it that easy. First off, I didn't want to use my camera's "time lapse" function, which appears to automatically combine the shots into a 1080p video file. While that may have been way easier, it would mean I wouldn't necessarily be able to make specific edits to individual shots, and I'd be capped at that measly 1080 resolution. That probably wouldn't be cause for concern with most people, but spending most of my day job yapping about 4K TVs, as well as doing all my photo editing at home on a 2K monitor, makes the thought of only have 1080p after all my efforts akin to recording it on VHS tape. My d800 shoots stills in 36 megapixels, 1080p is equivalent to 2 megapixels, gross. So I turned to the camera's "interval timer shooting" function, which allowed me to set an interval between shots and number of shots.
Second in my attempt to make it more of a challenge, I thought it would be too boring to just have a static image the whole time. All the coolest time lapse shots I've seen have been set up using some expensive and elaborate motion rig, so the camera was panning smoothly across some beautiful prairie with thousands of stars flying past in the background. Whenever I try something new, I want to start off with a bang, so I thought long and hard about how to get results like that... without spending any money on it. I actually spent a lot of time scheming about using my son's "Thomas the Tank Engine" toy railroad tracks paired with wind-up toys and the like to DIY myself a nice motion rig to handle it all. But alas, the time constraints along with my lack of knowledge about all things mechanical kept me from coming up with anything feasible in time. Though I promise I will make an attempt sooner or later and hope you'll come back to read about it.
So I was forced to shoot a plain old non-moving time lapse like some kinda chump. Looking back, it was probably for the best since (me being me again) I decided to skip reading the directions, or watching an instructional video, or even trying out the interval timer shooting option before it was showtime. It was gorgeous out there. I spend almost every single night staring at the sky when I'm up at the north shore and this time seemed clearer and brighter than ever. Maybe it was Tettegouche, maybe it was favorable weather conditions, who knows, but I loved it. I just stood outside staring well past the time everyone else called it a night, especially after remembering that the Perseid meteor shower had begun. And even though it was still well before the peak for the Perseids, they were still in full swing in a clear sky like that. I saw maybe two dozen shooting stars before finally heading to bed. It was dazzling, and it got me very excited to see the time lapse.
I had set my camera to what I felt would have been the intuitive way to do it. I was using my 14-24mm f/2.8 lens, wide open, and zoomed all the way out. From past experiences, I knew the d800 could handle 1600 ISO just fine without an overabundance of noise and be able to capture a LOT of stars. Then I set the interval to ten seconds and the number of times to the highest number it would let me pick, in my head that sounded like "when one shot is done, wait ten seconds, then take another, and keep doing that until the memory card fills up or the battery dies". Upon thinking it over much later, after getting an actual solid night of sleep, it began to sound more and more like "take a shot every ten seconds, if the ten second mark passes and you're still in the middle of another shot because you set a 10 second interval for a 30 second exposure, it won't work properly, and you're dumb". That logic also helped to explain why my attempts only captured a fraction of the frames I had set it for even though the battery did not die and the card was not full.
I probably would have kicked myself over that one for longer but I noticed something as I was editing. I threw all my images into Lightroom, corrected the white balance, contrast, and clarity of the first image, and then just applied a batch sync of those edits to the rest of the photos. But I noticed that when I picked an image at random to verify results that the color seemed waaay off. The sky was a very unnatural looking green, though I knew that there should have been no change in camera settings or anything else through the whole batch. My first thought was that I was kicking the exposure adjustment in Lightroom a tad too far and was just bringing to light all of the image sensor imperfections and extreme low-light color casts, it still seemed odd though. I picked another photo and found the same problem, but now there was a horizontal stripe of "normal" colored sky right in the middle of the image. So now I was seeing a problem too consistent to be a fluke shot, yet too inconsistent to be any sort of improper setting or sensor error. Not wanting to pour through and individually color correct close to 400 images, I decided to just drop the whole batch into Premiere Pro and see if viewing them in motion would answer any of my questions. Watching the video, I could see green slowly begin to fill the sky and then slowly move through the frame in huge waves. It was quite clear that my camera had captured the northern lights, and that I had slept through what could have been a pretty awesome sight. It wasn't the way I'm used to seeing it in most photos or videos, but it's clear what it was.
Here's what I came up with, if you see an option for "original" down in the quality settings at the bottom, click that for the full resolution, if it only shows 1080p, then click that.
In attempt one, you are seeing a mix of both planes flying overhead, and meteors as well. The bright green light that only shows up for a frame or two is just a laser pointer we were playing around with.
So that's my little story and that's my little video, I've got a North Shore Photography trip on the books for some time in September with the usual gang of troublemakers, so I'm sure there will be much more to show after that.
Second in my attempt to make it more of a challenge, I thought it would be too boring to just have a static image the whole time. All the coolest time lapse shots I've seen have been set up using some expensive and elaborate motion rig, so the camera was panning smoothly across some beautiful prairie with thousands of stars flying past in the background. Whenever I try something new, I want to start off with a bang, so I thought long and hard about how to get results like that... without spending any money on it. I actually spent a lot of time scheming about using my son's "Thomas the Tank Engine" toy railroad tracks paired with wind-up toys and the like to DIY myself a nice motion rig to handle it all. But alas, the time constraints along with my lack of knowledge about all things mechanical kept me from coming up with anything feasible in time. Though I promise I will make an attempt sooner or later and hope you'll come back to read about it.
So I was forced to shoot a plain old non-moving time lapse like some kinda chump. Looking back, it was probably for the best since (me being me again) I decided to skip reading the directions, or watching an instructional video, or even trying out the interval timer shooting option before it was showtime. It was gorgeous out there. I spend almost every single night staring at the sky when I'm up at the north shore and this time seemed clearer and brighter than ever. Maybe it was Tettegouche, maybe it was favorable weather conditions, who knows, but I loved it. I just stood outside staring well past the time everyone else called it a night, especially after remembering that the Perseid meteor shower had begun. And even though it was still well before the peak for the Perseids, they were still in full swing in a clear sky like that. I saw maybe two dozen shooting stars before finally heading to bed. It was dazzling, and it got me very excited to see the time lapse.
I had set my camera to what I felt would have been the intuitive way to do it. I was using my 14-24mm f/2.8 lens, wide open, and zoomed all the way out. From past experiences, I knew the d800 could handle 1600 ISO just fine without an overabundance of noise and be able to capture a LOT of stars. Then I set the interval to ten seconds and the number of times to the highest number it would let me pick, in my head that sounded like "when one shot is done, wait ten seconds, then take another, and keep doing that until the memory card fills up or the battery dies". Upon thinking it over much later, after getting an actual solid night of sleep, it began to sound more and more like "take a shot every ten seconds, if the ten second mark passes and you're still in the middle of another shot because you set a 10 second interval for a 30 second exposure, it won't work properly, and you're dumb". That logic also helped to explain why my attempts only captured a fraction of the frames I had set it for even though the battery did not die and the card was not full.
I probably would have kicked myself over that one for longer but I noticed something as I was editing. I threw all my images into Lightroom, corrected the white balance, contrast, and clarity of the first image, and then just applied a batch sync of those edits to the rest of the photos. But I noticed that when I picked an image at random to verify results that the color seemed waaay off. The sky was a very unnatural looking green, though I knew that there should have been no change in camera settings or anything else through the whole batch. My first thought was that I was kicking the exposure adjustment in Lightroom a tad too far and was just bringing to light all of the image sensor imperfections and extreme low-light color casts, it still seemed odd though. I picked another photo and found the same problem, but now there was a horizontal stripe of "normal" colored sky right in the middle of the image. So now I was seeing a problem too consistent to be a fluke shot, yet too inconsistent to be any sort of improper setting or sensor error. Not wanting to pour through and individually color correct close to 400 images, I decided to just drop the whole batch into Premiere Pro and see if viewing them in motion would answer any of my questions. Watching the video, I could see green slowly begin to fill the sky and then slowly move through the frame in huge waves. It was quite clear that my camera had captured the northern lights, and that I had slept through what could have been a pretty awesome sight. It wasn't the way I'm used to seeing it in most photos or videos, but it's clear what it was.
Here's what I came up with, if you see an option for "original" down in the quality settings at the bottom, click that for the full resolution, if it only shows 1080p, then click that.
In attempt one, you are seeing a mix of both planes flying overhead, and meteors as well. The bright green light that only shows up for a frame or two is just a laser pointer we were playing around with.
So that's my little story and that's my little video, I've got a North Shore Photography trip on the books for some time in September with the usual gang of troublemakers, so I'm sure there will be much more to show after that.
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