With North Wales back in Covid lockdown in December 2020 and a 'stay at home' order in place the opportunities for visiting and photographing around our beautiful country were strictly curtailed.
So to vent my creative pressures I pointed my camera skywards to record the passage of the last full moon of 2020 through the night sky over the housing estate where I live.
For a normal timelapse in daylight, with a big scene to encompass, I'll shoot hundreds of RAW images with a few seconds in-between each frame, which is fine for recording cloud and water movement.
But for a relatively small, slow moving subject like the moon in a black sky I wanted to try something different, that would allow me to greatly enlarge the size of the moon in the video frame, but retain a smooth diagonal motion throughout the finished work.
To that end I changed my way of shooting and set the camera off recording large JPEG files on continous shooting at 4 frames per second.
It would have been nice to shoot RAW files at this frame rate, but neither my camera's buffer memory, nor my SD card, could cope with that amount of data, so full sized JPEGs were the order of the day, allowing me to shoot 4 frames per second continually until my memory card filled up.
Fortunately it only took just over 4,000 frames to completely capture the movement of the moon from one side of my viewfinder to the other, well within my 32GB memory card's capacity.
Assembling the final video in Adobe Premiere Pro was relatively straightforward, using the same still images at two different scale settings to create the 'zoomed out' and 'zoomed in' clips of the moon, with no details lost thanks to the large size of the original JPEG files.
Now I wonder what other moving subjects I could try this technique on?
Filename - moon full timelapse 05
Camera - Canon EOS 6DMK2
Lens - 100-400mm zoom @ 390mm
Exposure (start of sequence) - 1/125 sec @ f/5.6, ISO100
Exposure (end of sequence) - 1/125 sec @ f/5.6, ISO100
Filters - None.
Shooting interval - Approx 4 frames per second
Location - Buckley, North Wales
This clip - HD 720p, 30fps (4k and 1080p HD formats also available)
Clip duration - 92 seconds
All content copyright © Howard Litherland 2009-2021 unless otherwise stated.
