Detailed Tutorial On Shooting Day To Night Timelapses

Preston Kanak has released another highly informative video, this one on the subject of capturing successful day to night timelapses. In this long video, he covers different methods for achieving good results, such as bulb ramping, aperture priority, or blending it in post. Each of these methods is a bit different, and Preston shares many tips along way while showing plenty of examples.

This video also goes in depth on Preston's post workflow as well, including a screen recording of him working in Lightroom, LRTimelapse, and finally After Effects. If you are looking to capture any day to night timelapses, this video contains a wealth of knowledge to get you started. As always, Preston suggests going out and shooting as much as possible, as what you'll learn from attempting a few timelapses can help tremendously. For more details on capturing these kinds of sequences, you can read more over at Preston's blog post on day to night timelapses.

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Mike Wilkinson is an award-winning video director with his company Wilkinson Visual, currently based out of Lexington, Kentucky. Mike has been working in production for over 10 years as a shooter, editor, and producer. His passion lies in outdoor adventures, documentary filmmaking, photography, and locally-sourced food and beer.

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16 Comments

I always wanted to start timelapses, but was worried about shutter count on my DSLR. Few of these would worn out shutter, no?

Most cameras are good for at least 150,000 shutter acutations :)

Yeah, but to make it look smooth and not too short you'd need 10k shots at least.

No way. Not at all, most timelapses are done with well under 500 frames.

if you are doing 10,000 even with a 60 frame per second playback that is 166 seconds of timelapse. that is 2.7 minutes of timelapse.

Most of my timelapses are done in 360 frames which is 12 seconds of video. sometimes i go longer, but usually i keep it short.

Um, thanks for the info, I might try if the shutter count won't reach 1k.

Um, no. 10k is crazy high for a clip, unless you want a timelapse that is a few minutes long at 24fps.

True that. Don't be so worried though, shutters are easily changeable for a small fee :)

If you have a canon that can run Magic lantern and a RAW module you can make a RAW video with f.e. 0,2 fps, a photo every 5 seconds, there will be no shutter movement because the shutter will stay open all the time. The single RAW video frames behave exactly the same like RAW-photos and you can load them in Lightroom or Adobe camera RAW.

I do own Nikon though. Good to know that Canon has these features, seems to be better equipped for timelapses.

That is just part of the price of playing in timelape. For what it is worth i have been doing this for years and have never worn out a shutter. I think at most i have put about 60k images spaced over 2-3 cameras in the last year, this includes a LOT and i mean a LOT of images that are nothing more than images of my livingroom as I'm testing the motion control systems we build.

I have seen wedding photographers rack up shutter count faster than that

Ive shot over 4TB of timelapses in the past year. Camera sitting at over 300K shutter actions now. No need for servicing yet, altho it would help to have a dedicated timelapse camera. I shoot a lot of astro timelapses, there the main issue is stuck or burnt out pixels that accumulate over time due to the long exposures and high temperatures.

Great informative video.. thanks for doing this!

I enjoyed this video -- when I saw it on ISO1200.com 11 days ago. Meh.

Fantastic tutorial, thanks so much for sharing these approaches.

Really got a lot out of this. Thanks! Wondering why you went through after effects and on to premier pro or was that just to compare all three methods? Are you doing more color correction after leaving lightroom ordinarily? Ive been happy running from LRtimelapse back thru LR with his templates for output. But always looking for the best final product!

great video ey!