Quite an unusual night time photoshoot for me this time, as usually I'd be out up a mountain or on the North Wales coast for such an exercise.
But being in the middle of a course of chemotherapy in early July 2023 my more involved nightime adventures had been temporarily curtailed.
Hence my attempt at something closer to my home in Buckley, very close to home in fact, as this is the view out over my housing estate from my back bedroom window.
With the forecast predicting a clear night with no chance of rain I decided to have a go at an overnight shoot involving a lot more light pollution that I'm used to in my usual dark sky go-to locations.
My usual exposure setting when I'm clear of light pollution is 10 seconds at f/2.8 or f/4, depending on which lens I'm usuing, and an ISO of 6400.
These settings give a great exposure of the dark night skies, with the stars nice and bright with plenty of highlight detail that can take a lot of enhancement in Adobe Lightroom.
However, the ISO setting of 6400 was far too much for the lit housing estate, which I wanted to include in my composition for context, and as a static element against which to set the moving stars an occasional cloud.
So after some experimentation I used an ISO of 1600, which was a high as I could go without completely burning out the foreground houses, but sacrificing some of the less bright stars in the process.
Even so, the effect was quite pleasing, and I left the camera running overnight, plugged into the mains and with a high capacity memory card in place, while I was asleep in the room next door.
Waking up after sunrise I went to check on the camera to find it happily still clicking away every 10 seconds, recording a completely white image in the bright light of early morning.
No problem though, as I just deleted the later frames, leaving me with a nice nightime stars sequence, rapidly fading to white after a while as the sunrise approached.
Next time I try this I think I'll fit an ND grad filter, upside down to darken those bright houses somewhat an allow me to crank up the ISO a few more stops to get a brighter sky.
I may even catch the milky way tracking across the sky, as this is just slightly visible on this video, but should be easier to make out at a higher ISO.
Isn't photography fun, even under constrained circumstances!
Filename - buckley night timelapse 01
Camera - Canon EOS 6DMK2
Lens - 17-40mm zoom @ 26mm
Exposure (start of sequence) - 10 secs @ f/4, ISO1600
Exposure (end of sequence) - 10 secs @ f/4, ISO1600
Filters - None.
Music - Surrender - Asher Fulero
Shooting interval - 10 seconds
Location - Buckley, North, Wales
This clip - HD 720p, 30fps (4K and HD formats also available)
Clip duration - 20 seconds
All content copyright © Howard Litherland 2009-2023 unless otherwise stated.