It was really creative Easter. I had a chance to try HDR timelapse and I find it really rewarding. The processing with Photomatix and FCP seems not to be too difficult nor time consuming and the results are really stunning. I think I’ll post some more details on the workflow shortly.

Day to night time lapse transition

Also I did 2 attempts on a day to night transition which is commonly known as the timelapser’s Holy Grail. Well, to be honest, not that difficult. I think it is really helpful to use the Time Priority mode which generally does all the work with the exposure ramping. It decreases the iris progressively from F/22 to about F/1.8 and right after that starts boosting the ISO gain.. After the light conditions are stable I switch to manual mode to prevent any flicker. The first attempt you’ll see in the video below is a mix of manual exposure settings and some aperture settings, so the quality is not perfect. The second however is much better as I used the time priority approach as described above. I see only very little flicker (no flicker correction applied in post).

Shooting day to night timelapse at Lysa Gora

Another consideration is white balance. I don’t think it is possible to get any good results shooting in JPGs, but anyway I always use RAW. The issue is that during the day to night transition the temperature of the color changes rapidly and from my experience it is good to start with the WB set to about 6000 – 10 000K not to get too blue image and end about 3000K not to get the industrial light pollution too red. My actual workflow is to develop 2 sequences of RAW images and render twice for different white balance settings (let’s say one sequence at 3000K, the second one at 7500K). Then I blend progressively the movies to get smooth color transition. It is really time consuming but the results are good. I regret there’s no option to automate it in Adobe Bridge or Adobe After Effects. Maybe some sort of script could apply different WB settings progressively? The subject is also worth a separate post so I’ll write about it in the future.