Hi,
I recently bought Gunther’s book and yesterday I went and shot my first attempt to a Holy Grail timelapse. It is a day to night transition of my town (Santiago de Compostela, in Spain) shot from a nearby hill. It is not particularly good, but I wanted to see how everything worked.

To shoot the timelapse I used qdslrDashboard.

I think everything went smoothly and I took nearly 700 photographs with a 6 second interval from the start of the Golden hour and for two hours, well into darkness.

I enclose the first and last photographs of the series. My problem is that the last photograph (actually the last 100 or so) is overexposed. I used auto NTC but at the time of the last photograph the sky was much darker than it appears in the photograph and also the Street lights are too bright and they cover all the details. I used a 20mm equivalent lens, aperture between f11 and f8, shutter speed between (1/25 seconds (at the beginning) and 4 seconds (at the end) and ISO between 100 and 6400.

Is there anything I could have done to improve this or is it just a matter of decreasing exposure in lightroom when processing?

Thanks a lot in advance for your help.

Best regards,

Martin

Unfortunately there are no images attached.
At the end, the only thing you need to take care of (and possibly manually change the reference value while shooting) is that you don't blow highlights, that you would like to preserve. The rest can be done in post when editing the keyframes.
Auto NTC is not aimed to preserve streetlights. It's designed for transition until milkyway, where you have no artificial lights.
Normally, if you have artificial lights in a scene, you would stop ramping as soon as they start blowing.