Well - that was an unexpected treat!
I've just aquired a new lens, the Samyang 14mm f2.8 fully manual prime, for the main purpose of doing star photography and time lapses.
Naturally enough I wanted to give it a work out, to get the feel of it before embarking on a holiday in which, hopefully, I would be doing a lot of this type of photography.
Now where I live in North East Wales we don't get many clear nights, so it was with some excitement that I watched a ridge of high pressure develop over us in early Spetember 2015, with the promise of a least one cloud free night.
I couldn't pull an all-nighter, due to work committments, but I could manage a photography session starting very early in the morning and carrying on until sunrise at 6.35am, after which I would have to hustle to get to the factory on time.
So I set my alarm for 3.00am, aiming to be in position on the flanks of my local hill, Moel Famau to start photographing stars at around 3.45am.
With astronomical twilight occuring at around 4.45am, I should have had around and hour of full darkness to shoot the heavens in all their glory.
The only fly in that ointment was the fact that the crescent moon was due to rise in the east at around 1.00am, which would brighten the sky somewhat, but I reckoned that so long as I pointed my camera to the northwest I wouldn't be troubled too much by its light.
Well, I'm glad to say that, for once, everything went according to plan, in fact, things went a lot better than planned. (I love it when that happens!)
To begin with, when I got up early in the morning and took my first look out of the window I was greeted by a sea of fog.
Now I wasn't too bothered by that. In fact I was positively happy about it as I knew that, from my elevated photography position up on Moel Famau, I would be looking down on any mist or fog that would have formed in the Vale of Clwyd, stretched out before me.
And so it proved to be.
When I arrived at my chosen spot I had a billowing blanket of fog below me, though which I could see the glow of streetlights from Denbigh and the surrounding villages, while above I had a lovely clear black sky with the milky way plainly visible arcing over my head.
Well, my plan to just take a few still images of the stars to check out my new lens rapidly morphed into a full on time lapse shoot that lasted three hours and resulted in just over 600 still frames to edit and compile into this video.
But what I didn't know, and couldn't see with the naked eye (my naked eye anyway) was that the aurora borealis was flickering away on the northern horizon during the first part of my shoot.
Actually, I could see something going on, but I thought it was just light pollution from the North Wales coastal strip at the time.
It was only when I got to processing those 600 odd RAW files on a decent monitor that I saw those flickering lights for what they really were.
I was amazed and very pleased, as I'd never seen the northern lights before, let alone captured them on camera.
The rest of the video turned out pretty good too, with the milky way traversing the heavens above a sea of billowing fog until the dark of night was displaced by the light of dawn.
But there was one more astronomical effect that I'd captured that I wasn't aware of at the time, and that was the earth shadow, that band of magenta coloured sky that shrinks towards the western horizon as the sun approaches the eastern horizon.
Normally the change is too slow to notice, but speeded up 450 times in this video the effect is very pleasant to see.
So, all in all a very busy few hours on a hillside in North Wales, with some unexpected treats to enjoy along the way.
Because there's so much happening simulataneously in this video, I would recommend viewing it in HD over on Vimeo a few times, concentrating on a different part of the screen each time.
I hope you ejoy watching it as much as I enjoyed shooting and processing it.
Filename - night to dawn timelapse 01.mp4
Camera - Canon EOS 6D
Lens 14mm prime
Exposure (start of sequence)
15 secs @ f2.8, ISO3200
Exposure (end of sequence)
1/60 sec @ f2.8, ISO100
Capture interval - 15 secs
Location - Moel Famau, North Wales
This clip - HD 720p
Clip duration - 24 seconds
All content copyright © Howard Litherland 2009-2024 unless otherwise stated.