The recent snow storm that blasted the east coast did little damage here in NE Indiana. However, once the winds died down, the sky cleared and yesterday presented a good opportunity for a sunset timelapse. This type of timelapse is very challenging because of the wide range of brightness between direct sunlight and dusk. I had read on timescapes.org that sunset timelapses are good candidates for aperture priority, so I dialed my camera to Av and headed out to setup the tripod. My sunset location of choice is the pavilion on the north side of the Salamonie Reservoir dam. This location has a great view of the sky, and serves as a good location for sunset or astro timelapse photography. I set the intravalometer to take pictures every 20 seconds. The aperture was set to f/2.8 and the ISO set to 250. I attached a 24-70mm f/2.8 L lens to my Canon 5D Mark II and set the lens for a wide angle view at 24mm. The resulting timelapse came out as follows:

Sunset Timelapse at Salamonie Reservoir from Fourth Order Light on Vimeo.

Once the battery had run out on my sunset timelapse, I headed home to warm up. However I couldn’t help but notice the skies had remained clear. The Midwest skies during the winter don’t stay clear for long, so I hoped the clouds would stay off long enough for me to run an astro timelapse. Once I got home, I setup the same camera and lens combination, but this time I used the manual setting since I wasn’t expecting the brightness to change much. For the astro timeslapse I set the aperture to f/2.8 and the ISO to 1250. The shutter was set to allow for a 10 second exposure. I let the camera run until the battery had expired. When I went outside to retrieve the camera, the clouds had moved in thus blocking the stars. I didn’t know when the clouds rolled in, so I assumed the worst and expected a starless timelapse. This time, though, I was pleasantly surprised, and recorded the timelapse shown below.

Timelapse of Orion in the Night Sky from Fourth Order Light on Vimeo.

The fun thing about experimenting with timelapse photography is that there is no wrong way of doing things. Naturally there are some approaches that work better then others, but I’m enjoying this experimental phase and hope the lessons learned here will lead to higher quality captures of nature in motion.