Sometimes I'm just not in the mood to hike up a mountain in the freezing cold at the dead of night to try and capture the movements of stars and planets in the skies overhead.
But what to do when the urge to do some night time photography becomes too hard to resist, like at the peak of the Geminid meteors in December 2023?
Well, I cheat, and with a bit of clever tripod manipulation I can position my camera hanging out of my back bedroom window, overlooking the housing estate behind us while taking in a goodly amount of the night sky above.
Now there are pluses and minuses to this lazy man's approach to night photography.
On the plus side, I don't get cold and tired (more on that next).
Also on the plus side I have access to mains electricity, so instead of relying on battery power for my camera, I can use my mains adapter which means I don't have to get out of bed every hour or so to change the battery.
Again on the plus side, my camera and lens stay relatively warm, so I don't have to worry about condensation forming on the glass and ruining my time lapse sequence.
However, on the minus side, the high levels of light pollution mean that I can't crank up the camera's ISO to the levels I would normally use in a dark sky location, meaning that I'm capturing only the brighter stars and planets, and any clouds passing by take on a distinctly yellowish tinge.
Also on the minus side, the lights of the housing estate are so much brighter than the stars that it's hard to find an exposure level that captures the faint starlight while avoiding completely blowing out the lit houses and streets in the foreground - very distracting.
However, having encountered this problem on a previous occasion (see my Buckley Stars Timelapse #2 video), this time I fitted a 3 stop neutral density graduated filter to the front of my lens, upside down so the dark part of the filter was covering the brightly lit houses.
This helped a great deal in balancing the brightness level between the lit foreground and dark skies above.
And then all I had to do was to set my camera off on its run of ten second exposures and head to bed for a good night's sleep, wondering what I'd find on my memory card in the morning.
In the end I had one frame out of nearly two thousand that captured a decent meteor streak, before heavy clouds blotted out the night sky.
Not a bad way to conduct an overnight shoot, but maybe next time I'll climb up my local mountain instead!
Filename - buckley stars timelapse 03
Camera - Canon EOS 6DMK2
Lens - 17-40mm zoom @ 17mm
Exposure (start of sequence) - 10 secs @ f/4, ISO3200
Exposure (end of sequence) - 10 secs @ f/4, ISO3200
Filters - 3 stop neutral density graduated filter, used inverted to reduce the brightness of the foreground relative to the dark night sky.
Shooting interval - 10 seconds
Location - Buckley, North Wales
Music - Glacier - Patrick Patrikios
This clip - HD 720p, 30fps (4K, and 1080p HD formats also available)
Clip duration - 29 seconds
All content copyright © Howard Litherland 2009-2023 unless otherwise stated.