Hi all!

Processions in Easter are a very popular tradition here in Spain. Millions of people attend every year at many cities, so I decided to give them a try next week.

Needless to say, they take several hours and take place in urban areas with artificial light. Some start during the day and finish at night, so I will use the Holy Grail technique. So I was wondering if any of you has made this before, or something similar. My biggest concerns are what aperture to use (f number) and what shooting interval.

Regarding aperture, my guess is that the higher the better, since I will have more depth of field and it would be easier to avoid the excess of illumination at some places. But in the other hand, a high f number would probably force me to use a “maybe” too long shooting interval. By the way I’ll use my Nikon D810 paired with a Sigma 24mm lens (although I also have a Samyang 14mm and a Yongnuo 35mm).

Any ideas/suggestions on this? Am I missing any important detail to take into account? Here are some videos I found on YouTube (made by others with unknown equipment, but thought they are an example of what I want to do):

https://youtu.be/gAYs0kGm2q0?si=osZ-Ci7rUDilJ8j_

https://youtu.be/X4qla3TsGqc?si=vYszWMBpbmtlxYXq

https://youtu.be/PiDxMVqOKtY?si=5J1boScvEZU4coPh

Thank you all!

Personally I would advice against doing holy grail shots with different camera settings for such event where there is lot of fast movement and you would rather use very short intervals. With such short intervals (I would go for 1 sec or less, if you want to capture the crowds moving) you would get way too many shots if you do it for a long time that cover light transistions.
So rather do many shorter timelapses from different angles, with different focal lenghts.
This will also allow you to cut an interesting video later with lots of shorter clips from different angles.

Keep the intervals short and the exposure times long. Use the aperture and ND filters to make sure the exposure time is at least half the interval time. This will give you a nice blur.

Depth of field via the Aperture mostly doesn't matter for such situations because you won't really have close foregrounds. You can ignore this when choosing the aperture. The effects that you see in the linked youtube videos are called "Miniature effect" where some blur is being added in post processing. This is not the lens.

I can only recommend to do a lot of practicing with different settings and see what works for which situation. Enjoy and share your results when done in the showroom board! :-)

Makes perfect sense! Crowd movement is not the main goal, but procession movement itself, so maybe I'll try with 1,5 seconds or even 2, since the procession itself is not as fast as crowd movement. Maybe the most interesting moments could benefit from a 1 second interval, but I can handle changing the interval on the fly with your amazing LRT PRO Timer (v2, buying v3 soon).

Never thought about doing shorter sequences with different angles & focal lengths. My idea was to capture a main sequence with the 24mm lens and later cropping in post (by zooming in to details), given the fact that the D810 outputs near 8K images that can later be zoomed in to full HD without losing quality. So I will take into account your suggestion, of course!

Finallly I'll be shooting at night, so no holy grail. I haven't got ND filters, and given the light conditions I'll play with aperture and exposure times and see what I get. In my town there are processions almost every day, so plenty of chances to experiment!

Good to know that detail about depth of field. I'll start with a f number of 11 or so and maybe 0,5 seconds of exposure. If the light is enough I'll start from there and see the result.

Thanks for all the support and suggestions!Needless to say I'll be posting at the showroom as always!

Cheers from Southern Spain!