Finally I had a week off in sunny Greece to rest after quite intensive summer months. However, I had to shoot some hyperlapse, because there are views I don’t see very often 😉 For this week I’ve got something quite unique – a holy grail sunrise hyperlapse shot. You don’t see such shots very often 😉 Of course it’s way easier to shoot a static holy grail, however I hope people would experiment more and more with hyperlapse. Check out the shot and description below!
I wasn’t sure how I want to capture this sunrise, so I just left my room a little earlier and start looking for some interesting spot. I didn’t want another boring static shot and I knew that without foreground objects I need to have quite a long distance for my hyperlapse if I want it to look good. I chose a wooden promenade on the beach which was a few dozens meters long and just start hyperlapsing 😉 I had just a camera and a tripod. Unfortunately I didn’t took my NDs with me, so no filters on the lens.
Camera settings
I’ve started shooting with an intervalometer. I set the interval for 17 seconds, because I didn’t want to reach the end of the promenade too early 😉 When the sun came up I just disabled the intervalometer and shoot manually as fast as possible – so after moving and repositioning the camera it was still about 12 sec. I moved the tripod for about two steps between each picture. As you know from my Hyperlapse Tutorial, it’s not that important to have super exact distances between each picture 😉
As always for sunrise, I’ve used holy grail technique, so I was manually changing the camera settings, in this shot it was shutter speed. I’ve started with shutter speed of 1/5 sec and ended up with SS of 1/100 sec, changing each time for 1/3EV. If you’re not familiar with Holy Grail technique, check out my tutorial: Day to Night – Holy Grail Technique.
Post Production
As always, I used LRTimelapse to compensate the holy grail exposure jumps and deflicker the shot. It’s a hyperlapse shot, so it needs to be stabilized. I imported the JPGs to the After Effects and run the Warp Stabilizer. The effect was quite good, but not perfect. I precomposed the layer and used Stabilize Motion feature, stabilizing the position of one point around the fixed point I used for hyperlapse. The result was much better, I manually fixed some rotation isssues and the shot was almost ready 😉
The last thing I did was making it a little smoother (especially water). I duplicated the layer move one frame to the right and set the opacity to 50%. It’s a simple and very useful solution for some timelapse shots 😉 The objects on the foreground were moving quite fast, so I had to mask them out from the upper layer to avoid ghosting. I’m happy with the results 🙂 Of course, it would be much better to use long shutter speed to make the water silky smooth, but sometimes you just have to fix it in post 😉
Don’t forget to share your holiday shots on my facebook group: http://facebook.com/groups/timelapse.hyperlapse
See you next week!
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