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Setting Intervalometer And Capturing Cityscape

Lesson 5 from: Capturing and Processing Night Photography

Tim Cooper

Setting Intervalometer And Capturing Cityscape

Lesson 5 from: Capturing and Processing Night Photography

Tim Cooper

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Lesson Info

5. Setting Intervalometer And Capturing Cityscape

Lesson Info

Setting Intervalometer And Capturing Cityscape

Okay so now that we've got our first dark shot taken we want to go to a minute and then we wanna go to two minutes and that's gonna be a stop in between and the sky and the water will get brighter and brighter. But in order to get to that mode setting and shoot for a minute I've got to set my intervalometer. Now each intervalometer is a little bit different but they're all kind of similar, they all have a little light on here that you can hit. Let me set that alarm for one minute and I'm just gonna make sure that the interval is at one. That's fine and the number is at infinity which I don't want. Now I just keep on taking multiple shots and that's a setting that I use for star trails. We're not gonna use that tonight. So really all we needed to set was the length of time to be a minute and then the one thing you're gonna want to be aware of is there's two buttons on here that start your intervalometer and this is just gonna act as a normal cable release. It's usually the one in the up...

per right hand corner. Now we'll actually set the timed mode. So I'm turning my live view off and we're off, let the magic happen. This is actually one of my favorite things about nighttime photography, it's that after doing it for a while and having this time in between exposures, there are while these exposures' going on, you start to realize how much time you have to appreciate the scene and you start to realize how hurried you can be in daytime photography when you're shooting at a 25th of a second or 250th of a second and waiting for that right lighting, that moment is gone and there's a lot of people that do that really well. I find this to be really quite relaxing knowing that I'm actually making an exposure right now and having the time just to look out over the city and enjoy it. It brings a whole new level of enjoyment to my photography. So let's just take a look at his final image. Before I forget I remember putting my intervalometer on while my exposure was going, not a great idea, so let's make sure that that's sharp and that's looking nice and sharp to me so let's now go in and check our histogram and we can see that yeah, we've got it almost like a daylight histogram here. So there's gonna be plenty of information to work with on this final image. Now let's just kind of review what we did. We started off a little bit earlier in the night before it got completely dark. That allowed us to set up our camera, get good focus, fine tune our composition, look around the area to make sure everything was safe, make sure we're not falling off any cliffs and we started the shoot. Light gets darker and darker and a lot of times I find that some of those at dusk shots or those civil twilight shots are absolutely miraculous. They're very beautiful but we kept shooting and we're going into the night again. Now at this point, the sky is just a little bit darker than the manmade illumination of the city's so there's an exposure disparity there so we decided to shoot three different photographs. Our first exposure which was our 30 second exposure was set so that we had good detail in our highlights. Our next exposure was a minute long. That changes the brightness a little bit, brings a little bit more, it opens up the bay a little bit and opens up our clouds and then we did a two minute exposure. Now we've got a lot of brightness to play with. So what we'll do is in Photoshop and Lightroom we're gonna blend all those images together. We're gonna pull the best parts out of the bay. We're gonna pull the best parts out of the cloud. We'll pull the best parts out of the light and we'll combine them all just to make one awesome photo. So what I wanna do is I wanna look around and see what else we can find up here on the Marin Headlands.

Ratings and Reviews

Phillip Ziegler
 

This course, along with the others by Tim Cooper, are outstanding. His demonstrations and explanations are so clear and easy to follow. I've been out doing long exposure night photography using what i learned from Tim and and delighted by the results.

Jacqueline Hatton
 

Student Work

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