Time-lapse photography-how to naturally transition from day to night

Time-lapse photography is also called time-lapse photography and time-lapse video recording. It is a kind of time-compressed shooting technology, which is also called time-reduced video at present. It takes a group of photos or videos, and then through photo stitching or video frame extraction, it compresses the process of minutes, hours or even days and years into a short period of time and plays it out in the form of video. In time-lapse photography video, the slow change process of an object or scene is compressed into a very short time, showing a strange and wonderful scene that is usually imperceptible to the naked eye. Time-lapse photography can be regarded as the opposite of high-speed photography. Time-lapse photography is usually used to shoot urban scenery, natural scenery, astronomical phenomena, urban life, architectural manufacturing, biological evolution and other topics.

Day-night delay

When shooting is delayed day and night, the sharp change of light is always inevitable. The flickering of sunlight, car lights and advertising lights will affect the viewing degree of day and night delay. Even if we try to avoid these influences, the change of light at sunset is inevitable.

How to shoot an excessively natural day and night delay?

prepare

You need to prepare:

1. Reliable tripod

2. Camera (RAW is the best format for shooting)

3. Timing cable release (if the camera does not shoot regularly)

4. Large-capacity memory card (enough for shooting)

Software preparation:

1. Lighthouse

2. Modify (a picture or photograph) by computer.

3.lr delay

Step 4 premiere

5. Sequela

opportune time and geographical advantages

When choosing the shooting location, the three main tasks are: to find the moving elements, to find the beautiful night scene, and to avoid the flickering strong light source.

Among them, the elements of movement can be common clouds and traffic, and can also be changes in light and shadow. Time-lapse photography without change is no different from ordinary video. Some scenes have good light during the day, but they are dull at night.

The flickering strong light source is an element that needs to be avoided as far as possible in the time-lapse photography of "day to night", otherwise it will be very troublesome to deal with it later.

shooting time

You need to know where you are and when the sun sets. This time point is easy to find, for example, it is included in the "weather" that comes with it, and generally arrives at the shooting point 1 hour in advance.

Turn on the camera and start shooting!

Before you start shooting, determine your interval shooting time. If your camera does not have the "interval shooting" function, you need to use a cable releaser with this function. It is recommended to shoot with a file (aperture first), because if the aperture value changes, the picture will be blurred for a while and clear for a while because of the depth of field. The light intensity between day and night is very different, so it is not recommended to set the aperture value too small, otherwise the shutter time at night will exceed the interval shooting time (for example, the shutter time is 8s and the interval shooting time is 5s), and the final composition will cause the picture to be unsmooth.

Finally, if you want to make the picture quality better and have more room for adjustment later, please be sure to shoot in RAW format!

Set the shooting interval and camera parameters, and then you just need to start shooting and let the cameras start shooting one by one.

Late adjustment

After a long wait of several hours, you have taken hundreds of photos.

Now open the folder where the LRT photos are located (LRTimelapse). After loading, you can see a curve in the preview in the upper left corner, which represents the brightness change in this time-lapse photography (you can preview the video by dragging the progress bar).

Click Keyframe Wizard in the visual workflow to add keyframes to the video. The more key frames, the more flexible the way to control the exposure and color in the later stage. Generally speaking, I set three key frames in the delay from day to night, representing day and night respectively. Click Save after setting, and then enter Lr (Lightroom) to continue the operation.

Open Lr, import all photos (remember to select Move), then click on a picture at will, right-click metadata-save metadata to a file, and then reopen LRT.

Click Reload-Auto-overrun-Save in LRT, then click Visual Preview-Visual Flashback, drag the slider to adjust the smoothness, click Visual Preview again, and save the metadata after completion.

Open Lr again, close the filter, Ctrl A selects all photos, and right-click metadata-read metadata from the file. After reading it, complete all the automatic transitions and later stages of the picture, and finally export the picture, which can be directly made into a video in Pr. At this point, the natural transition from day to night delay is completed.