Night Timelapse

Jacob Potts · Feb 15, 2019

I work on a boat on the inland river system for a month at a time, and I would like to make a timelapse similar to this. The one thing I'm not sure of, is how he took the night shots while the boat was moving. How would you go about doing that? If you do a long exposure it would end up blurry I would think since the platform the camera is on is moving.

K9Kirk · Feb 16, 2019

I could be wrong but my 'guess' would be that since the stars are so far away and the boat is moving so slow a long exposure wouldn't affect it that much. To the naked eye or camera eye things real far away don't appear to move much when you move. I would experiment with it. If it were me I would use as large an aperture as possible to let in a lot of light and a very high ISO. What do I know, I'm a certified newb according to the site, ha! GL! Let us know your findings so others will know, thanks!

TreeofLifeStairs · Feb 17, 2019

A couple observations.

First, the ship looks very large and less prone to movement from waves. You mention being on a boat. I don’t know how big it is but you also said you’d be on an inland river system so no waves and swells like on the ocean which will benefit you.

Second, it looks like the lens is a very wide angled lens which will also lessen the effect of the movement. You’d still want the shutter to be open as short as possible.

Jacob Potts · Feb 18, 2019

Thanks for the replies, I'm due back on Wednesday so I'll give this a shot then. The boat I work on is 150' long 35'wide and about 40' tall, so it's a good sized boat. Our top speed is in the 5-6 mph range. It sounds like I should just be able to set it up like I normally would, and that we're going slow enough it wont mess the shot up. I'll include one of my drone videos from last trip so you can kind of see what I'm talking about. Also, ill be using a nikon d 7200 with a Rokinon 14mm f/2.8

Jacob Potts · Mar 4, 2019

Short nightlapse for yesterday. So far I have about 120 GB and 27 mins on my timelapse and I'm not even halfway through the trip yet. I'll post a link to the final thing in here.

K9Kirk · Mar 4, 2019

Jacob Potts said:
Short nightlapse for yesterday. So far I have about 120 GB and 27 mins on my timelapse and I'm not even halfway through the trip yet. I'll post a link to the final thing in here.

Good job, Jacob, looks wonderful!