Hi Gunther-

So far I am totally happy with LRT. It works great, and I'm getting better at the workflow.

The Holy Grail method works great for day to night transitions (increasing ISO as the sky darkens). Also, time lapse sequences in stable lighting turn out great with LRT. The one area I'm still struggling with is night-to-day sunrise sequences

I'm shooting fully manual, wide open aperture, and a ND filter (1.8/64X), starting with low ISO, WB set to daylight, starting in near darkness. For the record I'm using a Nikon D7000 and Tokina 11-16. Also, I'm using a manual intervalometer on my Nikon so that I can stop the sequence without touching the camera, shorten shutter speed, and restart the invtervalometer. I am trying to follow your Holy Grail approach as best as I can. I'm getting perfect, slightly underexposed pics and great sunrise colors until the sun hits the horizon, then the images become rapidly overexposed and noisy. There are rapid changes in less than a minute, and I risk shaking the camera with lots of shutter speed adjustments.

I'd appreciate any suggestions in camera settings for sunrises. Would you suggest going back to aperture priority for cloudless sunrises?

I'm not a professional, but my sense is that day-to-night transitions are easier than night to day. With day-to-night transitions, you are setting exposure for the brightest part and can avoid overexposing the image pretty easily. Shooting sunrises with lots of clouds also seems to slow exposure changes.

Timelapse requires lots of trial and error. Most of my sunrise sequences require hiking up mountains in the dark. Getting up at 4am to hike up a mountain in the dark for a sunrise isn't a great time for trial and error. Thanks!

Hi, it certainly depends from the scenery and how bright the sun rises over the horizon how often you will have to adjust.
Normall it's really the same thing like shooting sun sets, but many places sun rises are brighter because dust settled during the night and the sky is clearer.
The Problem you are experiencing is less a time lapse one - it's the problem of really contrasty sunrise situations where you struggle to find the right exposure without oerblowing the sun and still getting some details in the shadows.
I would rather underexpose in those situation, with the D7000 sensor you have a lot of reserve in the shadows.

Switching to A mode wouldn't help because the problem is the high dynamic range of such scenes and camera automatics woul have the same problems and introducing additional ones. So my recommendation is to carefully observe the metering and rather underexpose. You will have to practice this.

I already have shot some of those sequences and got very good results.

Hi Tahoe.

I've shoot few sunrise in the last couple of week, and I found it much more difficult than shooting sunset. It's much more demanding to have clean result with sunrise than with sunset. Mostly because as it getting brighter it's easy to overexpose and get blown up part in you photo, and become realy hard to correct in LightRoom. I carefully watch the histogram and adjust shutter to never hit full white. Of course with a clear sky, shooting right in front of the rising sun you will need to seriously play with the exposure, when it show up. If you have a stable tripod you can do it without stopping the intervalometer, it will be barely noticeable.

After the sun came up it will be realy difficult to not overexpose and keep the foreground visible. You have to really know your camera and underexposure just enough to don't burn the sun to much and to keep information in the dark part to get them back in lighroom. It's all the deal to play with the dynamic range of your camera, or expand it and shooting in HDR.

Good luck with you shoot, and be carefull hiking your montain in the dark.

Thanks for both of your replies.

I'm going to put together a short video of sunrises with my results (good, okay, and terrible), as a teaching and discussion tool. I ran the same sunrise through LRTimelapse 6 times with different develop settings. I produced an interesting array of footage (8-12 seconds long).

I'll post it later today or tomorrow.

Thanks again.