I’ve always loved time-lapses, but I’ve put off learning how to make one in changing light for the longest time. Usually, if I made a time-lapse during a sunset, also known as a holy grail time-lapse, one of two things would happen. It would either get dark way too quickly when there were still colors and clouds I wanted to capture (I wouldn’t change any settings for the time-lapse), or the time-lapse would flicker as the light changed (I would let my camera automatically expose for every shot or expose manually for every shot).
So I read up on the subject and, as it turns out, there is some technical work to be done while taking the time-lapse pictures, but what it really comes down to is the software you use to edit time-lapses. Good thing is, it’s FREE.
Amateur Takes on Sunset Time-lapses
The Shooting
Though creating an awesome time-lapse does mostly come down to using LRTimelapse, there is a best way to shoot time-lapses for them to come out as smooth as possible. (There may be other ways, but this is how I learned.)
To sum it up, you need to set the exposure as you want it, which will usually be ‘0’ on your exposure meter, and then switch back to 0 as it gets darker or lighter on your exposure meter.
I’ll share my learning process to get the hang of this with you – I made sunset time-lapses because 6 a.m. is too early. First, I set up my camera and balanced my image by setting the exposure meter to ‘0.’ With coffee in hand and a book to read, I clicked the intervalometer to begin my time-lapse at an interval of 6 seconds. Then, I kept watch for when the light began to change.
As the sun set, it got darker and my exposure meter read -1/3, then -2/3 and finally 1. That’s when I switched back to 0 and repeated the process for as long as I wished. The second day, I set everything up and decided to be more precise, so every time it got darker and my exposure meter read -1/3, I adjusted it back to 0. This meant smaller jumps in light between sets of pictures than the first day and is better for when the time comes to edit the pictures into a time-lapse.
On the third day, I again adjusted every -1/3, but added a little something. See, once the sun dips under the horizon, the idea is for the time-lapse to show that it indeed has gotten darker (time passing) without letting it get so dark that you can’t see the beautiful details of the blue hour and night. This is a little hard to explain, but I’ll do my best.
As it gets dark, you need to end up adjusting your exposure to -1, not 0. To do this gradually, once the sun set, I left the exposure meter until it read -2/3 and then adjusted it to -1/3 four or five times. Then I let it fall to -1 and adjusted it to -2/3 four or five times. Finally, I let it fall to -1 and 1/3 and from then on adjusted to -1 until I was done with the time-lapse.
After day 3, that was pretty much it, so I continued to play around with techniques and settings. All in all, it’s pretty simple and straightforward. Some key points: adjust your exposure through shutter speed until the shutter speed is half your time-lapse interval (so, if you’re taking pictures every 6 seconds, don’t set your shutter speed over 3 seconds). Once you get to that point, start changing your ISO. Also, it’s best to pause your intervalometer every time you adjust your exposure, but don’t take too long because you want to maintain the time-lapse’s continuity.
I had a blast sitting on the balcony reading and making time-lapses. We switched apartments since then and, though it’s an upgrade, we don’t have quite the view. See all the time-lapses I made right here below!
The Editing
I learned the art of holy-grail time-lapsing using Lightroom and LRTimelapse. Thankfully, LRTimelapse is free… to a certain extent. But it was a sufficient extent! The most limiting factor about LRTimelapse for an amateur like myself is that you can only make time-lapses with 400 pictures. I had some 900-picture time-lapses to make, which meant I had to make three separate time-lapses and put them together in Premiere. This led to some jumps in exposure, but I’ll take it.
Now, I’m not going to go in-depth on how to use the software, but it works like this: you import your photos into LRTimelapse, straighten some squiggly lines, move your photos to Lightroom to edit them, move them back to LRTimelapse to create the transitions between pictures and de-flicker your time-lapse, and finally move back to Lightroom to export your completed time-lapse as a video.
This may sound like complete nonsense to you coming from me, which reminds me – here are the links to the guides I read and watched to learn how to make day-night time-lapses.
- To learn about shooting a time-lapse.
- To learn how to edit a time-lapse without changing light.
- To learn how to edit a time-lapse with changing exposure.
This was my very first blog post in the “Becoming a Better Photographer” series. Check them all out here!
