I spent last week shooting a promotional video at the Polish seaside. Even if it was 99% video I had to shoot some timelapse 🙂 It was a good occasion to test my new gradual ND filter. It’s an awesome tool for static timelapses and definitely I can recommend it to everyone 🙂 Check out the shot and my settings below!
This is a shot from my 52 Timelapse Project. You can check out the details of the project or full list of the shots.
For actual sunset (not a longer day to night transition) it is possible to shoot with manual settings without changing anything, because the brightness is not changing that much. I wanted this to be a little longer than just sun hiding behind the horizon, so I used the holy grail method, which I described in this article: Day to Night – Holy Grail Technique [19th of 52 Timelapse Project]
The main part here is the filters I used. I wanted to make the stone-water part brighter and the water blurred in every picture. Of course I could make the bottom part of the frame a little brighter in post taking advantage of RAW data, but it’s way better to do as much in camera as possible. This will improve the overall quality of the shot 😉
To lenghten the shutter speed I used ND8 (3 EV darker) and on top of that I screwed the gradual filter, which looks like in the picture below. To read more about ND filter in timelapse, check out this post: Should you use ND filters? Motion Blur in Timelapse
I haven’t used rectangular filters before, because I think circular filters are more compact. However, it was really hard to find a gradual filter to my Sigma 10-20mm which has 82mm filter thread, so finally I decided to try it 😉 And it’s not that bad! There is a huge advantage when it comes to gradual filters: you can move it up and down to adjust it to the horizon. I got the Cokin filter for about 20$ (you’ve got to buy the holder seperately). I was suprised it’s made of plastic, not glass, but for now it works fine. Definitely I’ve got to be careful not to scratch it.
My tip for shooting on the beach is to firmly position your tripod, pushing it into the sand.
For this shot I used interval of 5 seconds – it was a very safe choice, so I had to speed up the clip in post 😉 The waves were quite big, I wasn’t sure how it would look on the final footage, but with some frame blending it looks quite smooth 😉
That’s all for this week, static, but I think interesting shot 😉 See you next week!
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