Hello all,
Finally here is my first serious attempt to a achieve a holy grail in timelapse. Things got complicted because I used an ultra wide angle lens and I wanted both sun and stars in the movie. The result is technically not yet perfect but nice to watch I hope!

The remaining technical problems are (as far as I understand it for now) uneven nd-filter-strength over the cross section, which caused slightly uneven, uncorrectable brightness differences of the images. This may not be a problem in moderate wide angle or tele position, but in ultra wide angle it is a problem obviously.
Beside that there are some small shaking issues that occured when touching the lens for changing the nd-filters (camera was mounted sturdily, but the inner part of the lens allows some movement as I found out after the shooting).

Tips for improvement are welcome!


Music: Nelman Music System, Retro-Secuencia

Some technical data:
Panasonic GH1 with Olympus 9-18 mm at 9 mm and a bunch of ND-filters
Recorded in full manual mode with 1/3 eV-steps
Edited with LRTimelapse, Lightroom, iMovie

[Video: https://vimeo.com/45014216]

Congratulations to this nearly perfect result! Pretty cool.
The only think I would try is to brighten the last part a bit, it's a pity you can't see more of the stars - isn't there enough "room" in the RAW files to pull some more details in the last part?

This post was last modified: 2012-07-02, 08:42 by keksi.

Congratulations to this nearly perfect result! Pretty cool.
The only think I would try is to brighten the last part a bit, it's a pity you can't see more of the stars - isn't there enough "room" in the RAW files to pull some more details in the last part?

Thx Gunther! I did try to brighten the last part, and it looked nice, but I got flicker in the lighter areas in the center (maybe the camera had a problem with ISO1000). I love the lens that I used because it is so greatly flare resistant, but it's just an f4, thats quite limiting.

For the next holy grail I will wait for full moon and very slow clouds, thus more light and longer exposure times. Or use another lens... And I will try flat frames for image correction.