How to shoot the starry sky from day to night, the simplest and most detailed sports time-lapse shooting

Today is the third episode of James' time-lapse photography tutorial. In the first two episodes, he shared the shooting methods required for two different scenes: sunset time-lapse and day-to-night time-lapse.

Today I will share more advanced operations, from day to night at the beach, and then to starry sky time-lapse photography, how to correctly determine the sunset and the rising and setting positions of the Milky Way. With the addition of electric guide rails, lens movement can enhance the dynamics of the picture and relatively speed up the rise of the Milky Way. speed.

In the past, it was difficult to take good pictures. Fortunately, cameras continue to improve. As the day turns to night, the starry sky no longer requires the complexity of switching from aperture priority mode to manual adjustment. We can AV without stopping.

I am James Yu Zhen, a professional landscape photographer, living in Adelaide, the third most livable rural area in the world and the first in Australia.

For today's material, we will show the most detailed operations in the "Look at my photo retouching" column, because the content is too much and too dry.

1: Shooting time

The time-lapse from day to night to the Milky Way must be planned, because the shooting time is very long, and the weather and moon images will be greatly affected. Therefore, a successful time-lapse from day to night and then to the starry sky must be well planned.

What kind of weather is best?

Clear sky is the best choice. Of course, if there are clouds at sunset, it is better to be cloudless at night. The worst thing is that if there are clouds at sunset, it will be impossible to take pictures if it is full of clouds at night.

Therefore, in addition to the probability of rainfall, we should also pay attention to the trend of clouds. I use the Windy weather APP. It is said that Lijing has good weather in China. In fact, as long as there are satellite trend charts of clouds, the APP only calls the weather station data to do different analyses.

What kind of moon is most suitable?

In fact, starry sky time-lapse has lower requirements on the moon than Milky Way photography. The new moon is most suitable for shooting the Milky Way, but it is not necessarily the most suitable for time-lapse. The best opportunity is if the moon rises or sets on the back of the Milky Way 2-3 hours after dark. , because a small amount of moonlight can illuminate the landscape, and it is also good to take advantage of a little light pollution.

Use Sky-Live to check the moon phases and the times of moonrise and moonset. Of course, this APP will also give you a stargazing index for your reference.

2: Shooting location

When day turns to night, I prefer the bustling areas of the city. When recording the lights after sunset, starry sky time-lapse cannot be shot in the urban area. Only by staying away from light pollution can the Milky Way be photographed, so the choice of shooting location is more complicated.

If the foreground is too monotonous, it will be boring when day turns to night. If there is no fill light for a foreground that is too complex, nothing will be visible in the starry sky stage.

A car and a tent with built-in lights are the easiest prospects to control.

But I prefer to go over the hills. Although my head is gray, I like the distant sea and watch the tide come and go.

Three: Equipment selection

Full-frame cameras with excellent high-sensitivity performance are recommended.

I use Nikon Z6-II.

It supports charging with a power bank and shooting at the same time. There is no need to replace the battery during shooting. The 25-megapixel file is not too big, and it can be processed quickly after taking thousands of photos.

Of course Z7-2 can also do it, but the 45.7 million files will be very stressful in post-processing. Unless you must produce 8K videos, you will consider using a high-pixel camera.

Supports the slowest shutter speed setting of automatic sensitivity, which is the key to a time-lapse shot of the sun turning to the stars.

It is necessary to choose a lens with a large aperture, because the larger the aperture, you can choose a lower sensitivity and use a shorter shutter speed, especially the latter is more important, because you don’t want the interval to be too long before sunset.

The ultra-wide angle is also easier to record the changing curve of the Milky Way, so I still choose Sigma’s 14mm, f1.8 lens, and I will also use the built-in starry sky soft focus lens of Kasei, which will make the effect more special. I will also use Z50 plus Seven Artisan 10mm fisheye lens fixed-point shooting comparison video.

The tripod I used today is the waterproof and sandproof Leitu Neptune 324, and the lightweight G2 gear head as the head. I mainly use electric guide rails and install two support rods for assistance.

I have used Sipp's Big Genie before. Although it is heavy, it is convenient to carry around in my bag. The disadvantage is that it can only rotate or move. If you want to rotate and move at the same time, you need to add accessories.

Thanks to Onion Factory for sending the third generation hot dog for testing with the 1.2-meter carbon fiber guide rail.

The reason for choosing it is that it is long enough, light enough, and the guide rail supports both movement and rotation, which will definitely make you tempted.

Four: Camera settings

What is the simplest, most convenient and safest way to set up a camera?

The previous method was to use aperture priority mode at sunset, and then manually adjust the exposure combination to shoot the starry sky after nightfall. There must be an interval of 3-5 seconds to allow you to adjust quickly. It requires a high level of operational proficiency, and I can't even do it if I ask myself.

I don’t know when it started, but the automatic sensitivity of the camera has a shutter time option, which allows you to shoot one shot to the end. The Holy Grail of time-lapse is no longer mysterious.

You must shoot in RAW format. Only in RAW format can you use LRTimelapse to de-flash and batch adjust in the post-processing. Select lossless compression to reduce the file size and shoot a lot of material, and the post-processing speed is also faster.

Automatic white balance is also left to post-processing for batch smoothing.

In aperture priority mode, no exposure compensation is set, because any compensation will be wrong.

The metering mode is average, I can choose 1.8 aperture, Seven Craftsman's fisheye lens can only be 2.8, 4 aperture will be very painful, don't worry about insufficient depth of field, time-lapse is not photography, video is dynamic, movement is more important than depth of field .

Select manual focus mode and try to focus on objects as far away as possible (preferably a hundred meters away). Think about why?

Because if you focus on an object that is too close, the stars will become blurry at night, so the key is that the foreground should not be too close.

Sensitivity setting is the key. Set the maximum sensitivity of automatic sensitivity to 3200. If you don’t like the Milky Way that is too clear, you can also choose 1600.

I hope to shorten the exposure time. The minimum shutter speed should actually be defined as the slowest shutter speed, set to 15 seconds, so the exposure parameters of the Galaxy will be 14mm focal length, 3200 ISO, 15 seconds shutter and f/1.8 aperture. This It is also my favorite parameter for Galaxy photography.

Some people think that the sensitivity is too high, because I want to get a higher quality galactic center effect, not just a few stars to make up the galaxy.

At sunset, it is similar to ISO100 for a few thousandths of a second, then it starts to slow down to 1 second, ISO100, and finally slows down to 15 seconds for ISO 100. At this time, the exposure time reaches the limit.

The camera starts to increase the sensitivity, ISO200 in 15 seconds, and finally reaches ISO3200 in 15 seconds.

The aperture and focal length did not change during the entire shooting process, so it was always 14mm and 1.8 aperture.

If the camera does not have this slowest exposure time, it is very likely that the ISO will jump to 1/250 and then jump directly to 1600. This is not what we want, and it is also the reason why the Holy Grail mode required manual adjustment in the past.

Five: Static delay

My challenge today is the electric slide rail, which is different from the static time-lapse photography.

Static time-lapse is much simpler and easier to understand. Just point the camera towards the position where the center of the Milky Way rises and compose the picture. At this time, you can use Sky-guide to help determine where the Milky Way will rise from in a few hours, and then aim at this position.

The Z50 is disgusting. It has no shutter release cable and can only use the built-in time-lapse function in the camera.

Open the camera's interval shooting menu and select the interval time as 16 seconds, because my longest shooting time is 15 seconds. If your longest shooting time is 30 seconds, then the interval time will be 31 seconds.

Be sure to turn on exposure smoothing to help the aperture priority mode soften the light better. You can try other settings yourself without affecting the shooting quality.

Six: Electric slide rail

The camera settings of the electric slide are the same as the static time-lapse, but the built-in interval shooting function of the camera cannot be used, and the time-lapse shooting function of the slide must be used.

Because we don’t take pictures when the slide rail is moving, we only take pictures after the slide rail has stopped.

The camera only needs to set the exposure parameters, and then use the shutter cable to connect the rail controller to ensure that the rail and the camera are synchronized.

The length of the onion factory guide rail is 1.2 meters. It is necessary to set the AB points at both ends first. I chose the starting position to take pictures of the sea view and sunset, the middle position to see the Milky Way rising, and the end position to still be able to take pictures of the Milky Way.

Also use sky-guide to find the sunset position, galactic center rising time and galactic center position at the end of preparation on site.

Install your phone on the guide rail first, and move it back and forth to determine the position of the Milky Way. This is the most important thing. Don't take the photo until the end, as the Milky Way is not in your picture at all.

Then adjust the gimbal's swing amplitude. If it's just day to night, I will choose the maximum amplitude. However, now I have to consider that the center of the galaxy is also rotating, so I must adjust the amplitude according to the position of the Skyguide.

The starting point, the middle point and the end are the three most critical positions. The starting time, sunset time, astronomical dark time and galactic center rising time, and the ending time of the shooting must be planned. I still have the moon rising time today. To consider, the shot was taken just an hour after the moon rose.

I plan to shoot for six hours. In the Onion Factory APP, I set the frame rate to 25, the shooting time to 360 minutes, the shooting time to 15 seconds, and then the stop time to 1 second. The number of shots will be automatically calculated, which is super convenient.

Seven: On-site debugging

No matter how good the plan is, sometimes things go wrong, so there is constant debugging on site, so you have to arrive at the scene 2 hours in advance for debugging. Because shooting usually starts one hour before sunset, the debugging time is actually only one hour.

Eight: Final summary:

Do you understand?

If you don’t understand it, I can only trouble you to read it again, take out your camera, take out your guide rail, and follow the settings. Sometimes it is better to do it yourself once after reading it a hundred times.

It took about ten hours from departure to completion. In the end, I only harvested a few hundred pieces of material, and the final output into a video was only about 20 seconds. Was it hard?

It's worth it if you like it. Who doesn't have some interests and hobbies of their own?

Some people like delicious food, some like beautiful women, but I only love the coldness of lonely sandbanks.

The photo hasn’t turned into time-lapse yet, and you’re ready to end it?

The fourth issue of "Watch Me Retouch" is waiting for you. Starting from importing photos to the hard drive, how to use LRTimelapse and Lightroom software to work together to process RAW format materials through various processing, exposure key frames, and synchronization of metadata. Flash, smooth, export, and render into the final 4K video. Are you looking forward to it? The most realistic post-production process.