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Lesson Info
14. In the Field: Shooting Moonrise
Lessons
M0 - Introduction
1An Introduction from Alex
01:25 2Coffee Q&A with Alex
09:26 3Introduction to the Workshop
01:51M1 - Timelapse Basics
4What is Timelapse
04:48 5Camera Gear
06:05 6Timelapse Gear
06:49Support Gear
03:14 8Field Essentials
03:46 9Key Takeaways
01:01M2 - Shooting
10Motion Timelapse
11:11 11In the Field: Manual Exposure Ramping
06:31 12In the Field: Shooting Waterfalls with Motion
07:55 13Astro-Timelapse
08:47 14In the Field: Shooting Moonrise
09:07 15How To Do A Lens Twist
03:17 16Day-to-Night Timelapse
06:42 17Day-to-Night at Tunnel View
05:01M3 - Editing
18Import Structure
10:37 19Basic Timelapse Editing
21:40 20Advanced Timelapse Editing
19:58 21Outro to Editing
00:56M4 - Developing and Planning a Project
22Seeing Life In Timelapse
03:57 23Finding Purpose In Your Timelapse
01:43 24Mood Boards & Shot Lists
08:39 25Production Schedule
02:55M5 - Outro
26Q&A with Alex
20:14Lesson Info
In the Field: Shooting Moonrise
(tranquil music) All right. We're here in Ahwahnee Meadows in Yosemite Valley to capture a transitional shot. So here in Ahwahnee Meadows, you have a really good point of view, or vantage point of Half Dome and Washington Column. And from the research we did earlier, we know that the moon might be rising right over Half Dome. We have to pinpoint the exact location of where the moon's gonna be rising. And we're gonna use an app called Moon Seeker. Now, the Moon Seeker app is set to tell you where the moon is right now. And so if I look over here, I can see that the moon is kind of, you know, directly over that direction, and if we follow the line, it should kind of rise somewhere over Half Dome. Now our goal is to frame Washington Column and Half Dome with the moon rising above Washington Column. And I'm thinking that we want to get a tight shot of that to make the moon just more visible in the shot, more prominent. So I'm gonna take this out and just start framing up my subject, just...
so that we can get from this vantage point. We're just opening up our tripod legs right now, and we're gonna start with these thicker legs, the thicker sections of the leg. That's where you're gonna find the most stability. And you don't really want to use these lower ones unless you need to, unless you need the extra height. These twist locks are really nice, they're just great for getting the tripod in and out really quick. We're using a 100 to 400 millimeter lens and that's a pretty big guy. So we're just gonna make sure that we put that right like that. That'll give our shot more stability, since we're gonna have the camera set up for a good while during this shot. I want to make sure that if I need to leave this location and come back to my camera later, that I can get back here, and I know those pathways. I need to make sure that I can get back here safely. Since it's a night shot, I don't wanna get my headlamp in the shot, so I'm just gonna make sure that I can get in and out and have that all happen outside of the frame of the camera. Because it's daytime, we can't figure out what exposure we're actually gonna be using for our moon rise shot. Because the moon rise is rising around 10 o'clock, we're going to wanna play around with our exposures and do some test shots of the night sky around where the moon will be rising. Maybe around 8 o'clock, 7 or 8 o'clock, right after sun sets. So we're gonna come back to that later and talk about how to find the right exposure for our moon ray shot. (tranquil music) All right, this here is a camera, it's inside a bag right now, and just trying to let the camera bring itself to temperature with the surrounding environment. When the camera is acclimated to the temperature of its surroundings, then any moisture in the air will not so easily condense on your lens. So I just wanna avoid fogging up the lens and you can see, (breath exhales) look at that, all the moisture in my breath. So think about that. If you're ever looking at your lens, like, is my lens fogging up? Make sure you don't blow into your lens, you do not wanna put moisture in the lens or else that will start to crystallize, and then there's no recovering that. You have to just let that dry out. (background chatter) We're gonna go dark for a second and we're gonna start taking some test shots. So number one, get a memory card, put it in here, (memory card clicks in) and make sure it's wiped of anything. You know, if there's something on here that you can't delete, then make sure you just get a different card and note that. So we've got all these settings right here, turned off. We don't want auto focus on, we don't want stabilizer on, we're gonna turn those off. Okay, now we're gonna take a look at our focus and we're gonna make sure that we have this right angle here which indicates infinity, set to line up. And I can't see it perfectly 'cause I'm not looking straight at it, but you want that right angle to be right in line with where it says 100, there's a line, a red line right there. You want the white line, the red line, to be lined up, and that will put you roughly at infinity. But because you can see it's like, you know, it could be here, it could be there, we're gonna take a few photos just to make sure that we're right on there, and we get a tack sharp image. We're gonna look and see how sharp the image looks after we take it and compare 'em. All right, so we're just gonna go over our settings now. We're just about ready to shoot, but first we have to make sure that everything looks good. We have a really fast shutter. Remember we want to capture the moon's movement, so we have to get as many photos as we can in a short period of time. So we're gonna use five seconds and we wanna use a wide open aperture to get as much light as possible. So 2.8 is the value for our aperture and using ISO 2500. And again, our white balance is locked 'cause every setting has to be locked throughout the time lot. Something can be changed unless you have special equipment to do that. And we're still on manual mode. We're gonna do a test right now to make sure that an interval of six seconds works for our four second exposure. Now I said that I was gonna shoot a five second exposure, but I made a last minute decision to change it to four seconds. It still looks pretty good. And I wanna keep the shutter down as to a small enough number as I can, small of a number as possible as I can. And I'm gonna hit go on this time lapse to just test and see if there's enough time in this interval for the camera to record that image and save it to the memory card so that it completely clears the buffer before it tries to takes the next photo. If it doesn't clear the buffer and save the memory card, then we won't be able to take a photo and it will miss frames of the time lapse and that will not be good. It will make the image look like it's skipping. So let's do that, let's just see if it works. I'm gonna take a look here at this red light, (shutter clicking) listen for the shutter, I just finished a shot and I just started another shot, so we're good still. (shutter clicking) Still good, still going, (shutter clicking) still going, looking good, feeling good about this, so I think we can roll it. We're just gonna babysit this shot a little bit to make sure nothing happens to it, occasionally check the lens to make sure this humidity, the moisture in the air, is not condensing our lens, without breathing or putting our light into the lens while we're looking. We have to do that in between frames, making sure that we're not being, putting our head into the frame. So let's just go ahead and do that. We're gonna roll this shot. So I'm gonna just start, start that by going to the settings and making sure that all these photos are saving to a new folder. We don't wanna save our photos into the same folder that we were just doing all our test images to, so that way, when we import all the images into our computer, that we only import images from the time-lapse, and it will make editing much easier. All right, so we're ready. Everything looks good. Just doing a last minute check. We're gonna turn our headlamps off. We turn our headlamps back off, we point 'em away from the camera. Make sure our headlamps are on red, red light, and never point the light directly into the camera. So I'm gonna do that right now. (camera clicks) Hit go. There's a little light right here so you can see the intervals going, (shutter clicking) looking good. Okay, now we just wait. (peaceful music) (music intensifies)
Class Materials
Bonus Materials with Purchase
Ratings and Reviews
Ondrej Dvorak
I have seen tons of timelapses, but there is no other timelapse film that touches my soul as much as Project Yosemite 1 I never forget the moment when I saw Project Yosemite for the first time! That moment I knew that that’s what I wanna DO! Colin is the reason that I bought my first DSLR! Thank You Alex for getting together with my hero and make this awesome idea happen!
Bryce Lord
Clear and concise workshop to understand the process of Time-lapse photography Being new to this aspect of photography, I found this workshop informative and directional. If I were to give a critique, it would be regarding equipment choice for the entry level bridging to pro-level for the introductory student. Otherwise, it lays a nice foundation to build from.
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