I had just finished shooting the stills for a sunrise time lapse from the promenade at Llandudno on the North Wales coast, and was sitting down for a rest having got up at 3.00am to get here in time, when looking up I noticed a fat crescent moon in the clear blue sky overhead.
The relative brightness of the moon and sky was just right to allow me to photograph the moon without over exposing its surface detail, while also retaining the blue colour in the sky.
Not willing to let this opportunity pass by I set my camera up with the longest lens I possess, the very handy Canon 100-400mm zoom, fitted a polariser to increase the saturation of the blue sky, and aimed the whole lot skywards to take yet another sequence of stills for subsequent processing into this time lapse video.
Now I'm always a bit wary of shooting stills for time lapse videos at these very long focal lengths, as the slightest camera movement inbetween frames can cause a nausea inducing twitchiness in the final clip.
So I did everything technically possible to make sure the camera stayed as rock steady as possible, including turning off all auto features, such as auto focusing and image stabilisation.
I also manually focused the lens using live view at 10x magnification, as I find this gives a better result than relying on my eye through the viewfinder.
Fortunately there was hardly any wind, which is usually a job stopper at these long focal lengths, but even so I set my tripod at its lowest level for maximum stability and set the external intervalometer to take a frame every three seconds, a shooting gap I've learnt the hard way is the minimum you need to allow vibrations from the previous exposure's mirror slap to die away.
And all things considered I'm very pleased with how this quite technically challenging time lapse came out.
Filename - moon timelapse 02.mp4
Camera - Canon 6D
Lens - 100-400mm zoom @400mm
Exposure - 1/13 sec, f5.6, ISO100
Time between exposures - 3 secs
Location - Llandudno, North Wales
This clip - HD 720p
Clip duration - 13 secs
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