Towards the end of April 2023 my wife Liz and I enjoyed a week's break at the Pine Lake resort at Carnforth, just to the south of England's Lake District.
Of course, our days were spent exploring and photographing the beautiful lakes and mountains of the Lake District, but the photographic effort didn't end on our return to Pine Lake.
We were fortunate enough to have a cabin with a covered balcony right on the lakeshore, looking southeast, which allowed me to try out some new accessories I'd bought for my Canon camera system.
Nothing exotic, but three items that gave me a step change in overnight time lapse capabilities.
The first item was a 128GB memory card, which has enough storage capacity for 3000+ RAW files, enough to last through the night wihout needing changing.
The second item was a wrap-around battery powered lens warmer, essential to prevent the front element of my camera's lens misting up as dewpoint is reached, usually just before dawn.
And the third item was a mains power adapter for the camera, meaning I didn't have to get out of bed every couple of hours to change the camera's battery on an overnight shoot.
So with my camera set up to take continuous 10 second exposures of the night sky and its reflection in the surface of the lake, sheltered from any rain on our covered balcony, I happily set it off shooting and went to bed.
Imagine my satisfaction come the morning to find my camera still manfully clicking away afer 8 hours or so of continuous shooting!
I was so pleased with the performance of this set up that I repeated the exercise every night of our stay, not knowing what the final edited time lapse videos would look like.
Some nights were completely clouded over, but out of all the sessions I got three time lapse videos that had a very pleasing mix of stars and clouds tracking over the lake, fading away as the dawn light crept across the early morning skies.
This is the third of those three time lapse videos, and no doubt I'll be repeating this overnight shooting technique anywhere I can hook up to mains electricity!
Filename - carnforth night timelapse 04
Camera - Canon EOS 6DMK2
Lens - 17-40mm zoom @ 17mm
Exposure (start of sequence) - 10 secs @ f/4, ISO1600
Exposure (end of sequence) - 10 secs @ f/4, ISO1600
Filters - None.
Shooting interval - 10 secs
Music - The Closing Of Summer - Asher Fulero
Location - Pine Lake resort, Carnforth, Lancashire, England
This clip - HD 720p, 30fps (8K, 4K and 1080p HD formats also available)
Clip duration - 32 seconds
All content copyright © Howard Litherland 2009-2023 unless otherwise stated.