Thursday, November 3, 2011

Pigeon Point Lighthouse night time-lapse photography


Well I figured out how to do time-lapse photography. I got an intervalometer and was able to time the beams of light so that it would look natural in a 24 frames per second replay. I had to boost the ISO all the way up to 6400 in order to capture the beams in my 15mm fish-eye lens at f/2.8 for a 2 second duration. The lighthouse beacon is a small Fresnel lens that has 6 beams of light, but each beam goes past a point on the horizon every 10 seconds. Since the shots were 2 seconds each, I set the intervalometer to a 9 second intervals meaning the next shot would be precisely 11 seconds apart and give the effect of rotating in a steady direction. Turned out to be good, because after 700+ shots, the stars can be seen slowly moving across the sky. Actually the earth is rotating and the stars appear to be moving across the sky.
After downloading the photographs into Lightroom 3 I edited the first photo and croped it to 9:16 for the best movie format. I then synched these settings for the rest of the photographs so they all look similar. I then used the slideshow developer in LR3 and used a preset I downloaded for free on the internet for the 24 frames per second, that is the most realistic fps setting to use. I then exported it to a Quicktime .mov at 1080p for HD quality and can then upload it to YouTube or my website for purchase if you like :D http://www.jeffparryphotography.com/buy/19783160_fTGCvw/

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