Late afternoon on a glorious, crisp March day found my wife Liz and I enjoying one of our favourite walks around the Marine Lake at West Kirby on the Wirral.
Earlier in the day the weather had been quite poor, and we hadn't set out with photography in mind, just a pleasant bit of exercise.
However, I'm glad I had all my camera gear in the boot of my car, as as sunset approached the last of the clouds cleared from the sky leaving an unusually well defined horizon out to the west over the North Wales coast.
To my further delight, as I plotted the sun's path to the horizon I realised that it would pass behind the distant, but clearly visible, lighthouse on the beach at Talacre, another of our favourite haunts. (There's so many to choose from in this beautiful part of the world!)
With a few minutes to spare until it was time to start shooting the stills for this timelapse I took extra care to try and get everything as technically perfect as I could, with camera carefully levelled and tripod adjustments fully tightened.
I also tried a new trick for this video, fitting a 6 stop Lee Filters 'Little Stopper' neutral density (ND) filter to the front of my lens to allow a longer shutter speed of 1/2 second, instead of the 1/125 second that it would have been without the filter.
Normally when taking a still photo you would want the faster shutter speed to freeze the movement of the sun across the frame, especially when photographing down the long end of a 400mm zoom lens.
But shooting with video in mind, it's better to use the slower shutter speed afforded by the ND filter and allow the sun to blur a little bit.
This slight blurring results in a smoother visual experience when watching the video, rather than the rather choppy look you can get when using faster shutter speeds.
This technique seems to have worked well for this clip, and it's a trick I'll be using in the future.
You live and learn!
Filename - sunset timelapse 18.mp4
Camera - Canon EOS 6D
Lens - 100-400mm zoom @ 400mm
Exposure - 1/2 sec @ f22, ISO100
Location - West Kirby, Wirral
This clip - HD 720p
Clip duration - 19 seconds at 25 frames per second.
Shooting interval - 2 seconds
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