At the end of June 2015 my wife Liz and I were treated by our children to a mystery three day break, and I only found out where we were staying as I arrived. (Liz already knew but she wasn't telling!)
So imagine my delight as we rolled up at a 'glamping' campsite in the village of Velindre in the Brecon Beacons National Park.
My delight wasn't just as a result of the beautiful mountains and waterfalls we were going to explore, but the fact that this area is the only dark skies reserve in Wales meant that I could finally put my Canon 6D through its low light paces and hopefully come up with some star photographs that didn't have an orange sky as a background.
The only fly in that particular ointment was that we were here on the pretty much the shortest nights of the year, a time of year that, at a latitude of 52 degrees north, the sky never actually gets dark as the sun is never too far below the horizion.
However, undeterred by such trivia, on the first night of our stay I set up my camera and tripod with the intention of pulling an all-nighter, capturing the change of light through sunset to the northwest and dusk and on into the darkest part of the night, followed by the returning light to the northeast in the early hours of the morning.
I chose a good night as the sky stayed relatively clear, and barring a couple of technical mishaps (more later), I was able to capture the stills to make this time lapse video, with the great low light performance of the Canon 6D picking up star details in the sky that I couldn't see with my naked eyes, including the milky way traversing across the heavens in the darkest part of the night.
Obviously I had to make a couple of dozen exposure changes during the entire course of the sequence to cope with the changing light, with the jumps in lighting being smoothed out in post-processing using LRTimelapse software.
Overall I was highly delighted with my first attempt at serious star time lapse photograhy, with the Brecon Beacons proving an ideal location for the job.
But what about those technical issues? Well they were simple but silly.
The first one occured when I came to change the camera's battery in the middle of the night, only to find that with the camera mounted on the my new Manfrotto 190 tripod I couldn't actually get the battery out of the camera as the adjustment knob for the three way head I was using prevented it.
In the end I had to remove the camera from the tripod to change the battery - not good practise when shooting time lapse! But I got away with it this time.
Next time I'm shooting a long sequence that will require a battery change I'll use my old original Manfrotto 055 as I know I can change the battery on this tripod.
My only other technical issue involved the front element of my lens misting up for half an hour or so around 2am.
I had got some cheap chemical hand warmers on the lens to keep it warm and fog free, but the hand warmers only worked for about five minutes each before giving up.
Fortunately, watching the finished video, the misty period isn't so bad, and you don't really notice it unless you're specifically looking for it.
The lesson learnt here is to buy decent hand warmers, not ones reduced in price because they're past their sell by date!
So this was a real learning experience for me, and barring a couple of silly technical issues which I'm now aware of, I'm ready for more when the nights get darker this autumn.
Filename - dusk to dawn timelapse 01.mp4
Camera - Canon 6D
Lens - 17-40mm zoom @17mm
Exposure (start of sequence)
1/160 sec, f4, ISO100
Exposure (darkest time)
15 secs, f4, ISO2500
Exposure (end of sequence)
15 secs, f4, ISO800
Time between exposures - 15 secs
Location - Velindre, Breacon Beacons, Wales
This clip - HD 720p
Clip duration - 47 secs
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