Hi,

I’m looking for a little help, or possibly some direction in shooting holy grail.

I have shot a number of Holy grail time lapses, but I’m currently having an issue where the my images appear to be too dark by the time the stars come out…
I use,
Camera – Canon 700D
Lens – Samyang 10mm 2.8 – Mechanical Focus and Aperture
I use manual mode, manual focus, I do set the white balance to auto, as I set this in post. I use a Hanhal remote interval meter and I also use CamRanger to change the shutter speed and ISO on the go.
I’m currently shooting in my back yard for testing, so there is light pollution.
I’m bulb ramping the camera’s exposure manually, I fixed my aperture to f/8, I started with an exposure of 1/250 and by the end of the night (duration of 2 hours) keeping the exposure at zero, and not moving more than 1 stop I finished on 5 second exposure and ISO 800.
When I import the files into LTTimeLapse 3.4.1 (at this stage I’m using the free copy, as I’m still learning), I find that all the night shoots images from the Time-lapse seem to drop to the bottom on the preview window in the top (the purple line).
Does the purple line mean the images are under exposed?
When compiling the images in lightroom, I find the stars too light and some of the image very noisy. When looking at the images, I feel I’m not shooting the night images correctly.
I have used qDSLDashboard, but find approx. half way through the shoot, that my exposure blows 3-4 steps to the right and appears to shoot a very over exposed image. Without using the qDSLDashboard, I also noticed while monitoring the exposure on my camera, it seems to take 2-3 different attempts on my camera to decide on the correct exposure.

My questions are
Should I set the White Balance to a fixed setting, or continue to use auto and resolve in Post?
Should I be monitoring Exposure Meter or should I be monitoring the histogram? And if so, what should I look for in the histogram?

Thanks
Lloyd

Yes, set WB to fixed and all other in cam processing to flat/linear. No Contrast/Active DLightning etc. in camera, since LRTimelapse will use the Camera preview (that have all those settings applied) as reference to calculate the curves.

Definiely use the histogram for anyalysis. I'd suggest using qDDB and learing hot to use it (check my tutorials!) because it's LRT module is designed exactly to do what you want.
When setting exposure for the initial image, se that the histogram is not being cut at the right. Then monitor the preview/histogram from time to time and adust the reference value if you feel the images get to dark or too bright. It's all explained in my Holy Grail tutorial on http://lrtimelapse.com/tutorial

Gunther, thanks for the quick reply…

I have retested tonight again with qDSLRDashboard, and have found a big improvement with using the Histogram, and I now understand why to use the histogram over the cameras determined exposure value.
Just a quick question on the reference value. If I start on a reference value, do I only change the reference value when I notice that the histogram moves to the right or the left.
To make sure I understand, so when the Histogram moves to the right, I decrease the value to reduce the exposure, and when the Histogram moves to the left, I increase the value to increase the exposure of the image?

Thanks very much for your help.
Lloyd

If you want the sequence to get rather darker, lower the reference value and vice versa.