A First Attempt at Time-Lapse Photography

I just uploaded part of the time-lapse sequence I recorded on my visit to Lyveden New Bield last weekend.  I will be honest and say that it didn’t turn out nearly as good as I had hoped.

Although I am pleased with the movement of the clouds, I clearly made an error in shooting the sequence because I had the camera set to Aperture Priority auto exposure (or Aperture Value as Canon like to call it), whereas I should have set the camera to Manual Exposure so that each frame had exactly the same shutter speed and aperture.

The change from bright sunlight to shade caused by the passing clouds affected the exposure to quite a large extent.  I only realised this after loading the images into Lightroom and noting the change in exposure between the sunlit shots and those taken when the building was under cloud cover.  The difference in exposure varied from 1/3rd stop to 1 whole stop and that was sufficient to make the sky change from a deep blue to a much lighter blue between frames.

To counteract that effect, I have manually adjusted the exposures in Lightroom using the exposure slider to reduce the exposure by 1/3rd stop, 2/3 stop, or 1 stop according to each exposure.  In theory, all the exposures should now be the same, but in practice there is a clear colour shift in the sky on the frames that I have adjusted.

It’s a lesson learned…

Here’s the video any way:

Lyveden Time Lapse Sequence (YouTube)