Sony F3 sunset time lapse over lake

[starcentral]

This is my first time lapse using the Sony F3. I shot it last Friday and used the interval setting on the camera and it worked out pretty good. Coincidentally the night I shot this is the same night our baby Evan was born. Happy Birthday Evan!

 

[Duke M.]

Congrats to you and Evan. And you caught a shooting star! Wow.

I've always been afraid of shooting a timelapse sunset in case I burned the sensor.

 

[PaPa]

really neat. Don't think that was a shooting star however, generally when i see them they are incredibly fast. Beautiful colors. Was the pulsing in the exposure intentional? Guess it's one of those difficult things when doing a timelapse.

Also, what shutter speed were you using?

Congratulations on the baby!!!

 

[starcentral]

Thanks everyone!

This was shot at 0db onto sxs Rec 709 with 1/48th shutter 1920x1080 @ 24fps with ND1 filter engaged (3 stops) and a 35mm lens starting at f22 taken down right to f1.4 over an hour period, then the ND1 filter taken off and resuming at f4 down to f1.4 again. Then I lost interest and stopped recording.

The pulses were definitely not intentional and were caused due to me gradually (as smooth as possible as I could) stopping down over the time lapse period. I used the LCD screen and histogram as my guide to keep exposure constant. I tried to smoothen this out in post as much as possible but it was difficult with the lack of having more frames to work with. The record interval was set to 1 frame every 5 seconds, when I try this again I will capture way more frames, possibly even 1fps. More frames would have let me split the track where the aperture is being adjusted and layer them and blend into eachother. In this example I could only layer 4-6 frames max which resulted in pulsing and funny sun movements.

The footage was pushed in post quite a bit. Mainly a post contrast and some curves applied. Some have commented on banding and chroma glow but I assure you anything odd you see is the compression effect of vimeo. The fade up from black shows obvious banding but not here on my computer. I also wanted to start off with the sun partially blown because that is how it looks to your eye - it is blown and hard to really look at, and this was only done 1 hour before sunset. I'm glad I didn't burn out my sensor!

All-and-all this was a good learning exercise, and the original and post footage in full HD is incredible as you would expect. I can blow up parts of the frame to just the sun filling the frame over the horizon and it looks amazing. The footage will still be usable for something I'm sure.