LRTimelapse Forum

This may have been discussed before but since I can't find the thread .....
I want to try the holy grail with qdslrdashboard and conclude with the milky way exposure (around f 2-2.8, 20 sec., ISO 3200). Around sunset (sun slightly above the horizon) the shutter speed will likely be around, f2, 1/500, ISO 100). With nice cloud movement around sunset this shutter is too fast. As mentioned in the tutorial, ramping the aperture from starting closed down to get a longer shutter can cause some problems (depth of field and vignetting). Removing neutral density filters as the evening progresses doesn't seem like an appropriate solution. So is there a "solution" to start with longer shutter speeds during daylight? If not, what is the suggested course to take (or is there something I'm missing)?
Thank you in advance.

The solution is to accept the shorter shutter speeds in that case. Or you could to interval ramping and do the sunset with way shorter intervals - then the clouds would be still rather smooth despite the short exposures - and then gradually ramp to longer intervals for the stars when the exposures would be also longer. You could do that with the LRT Pro Timer. https://lrtimelapse.com/lrtpt/

Or: you could do different shots - where one does the sunset with ND filter and then another angle does the transition later. Of course then this is not a full holy grail, but on the other hand it depends on what you will be using the clips for. For a film, it's mostly more interesting to have some variations in framing as opposed to having a long sequence with full transition. But that depends on what you want to do.

Thanks Gunther! Perfect response. This really helps me!

I was thinking about the same problem and last week I tried it with a Variable ND Filter during sunset - however I was not shooting into the night until Milky Way or anything like that. It worked pretty well and I agree with Gunther that having various clips leads to a better result in the end anyway as usually watching clips longer than 3-9 seconds already feels a little "boring" especially if you are not a timelapse and/or astrophotography geek.

I used qDslrDashboard app combined with the VND Filter and I worked like a swell - I was surprised how smooth it came out! just make sure to have a VND without "clicks" so you can turn it without shaking the camera while doing it.

Check out the result here if you like - the mentioned clip with then VND-Filter is at minute 1:31- 1:35
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxH6b2iVJVc

Thanks for the suggestions Joe! Interesting and different TL!