Camping in the back yard August 29, 2014 Aaron Priest Photography My kids love camping in the back yard. I set up my camera to point north for some circular star trails, and maybe a chance of aurora overnight. It was a very clear night. In the beginning of the timelapse you can see the kids running around with their glow sticks as we setup the tent. Andromeda is visible next to the northern end of the Milky Way. Cassiopeia is in the middle of the Milky Way. The kids have a toy that projects stars on the ceiling and walls that we wanted to try out in the tent when they went to bed. It slowly rotates through a few different colors. Sped up in the timelapse video it looks more like disco lights though! The rest of the lights in the tent are from the kids’ glow sticks. Pleiades shows up briefly on the right side in the middle of the timelapse, but goes out of frame after a few seconds. The bright star that rises out of the trees afterwards is Capella. There was a little bit of green airglow in the early morning hours, but no real aurora. I didnt setup anything too fancy for this timelapse, no bulb ramping or anything too complicated. Just single 30 second exposures every 3 seconds until dawn with a Promote Control, Nikon D700, and Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8 @ 14mm, f/2.8, and ISO 2500. White balance was gradually changed with LRTimelapse during post-processing. I used a Dew-Not heat strip with a DewBuster controller overnight to prevent dew, and powered the dew heater and camera from a 12v battery. I edited the RAW files to 16-bit TIFFs with Lightroom and LRTimelapse. The 16-bit TIFFs were rendered to a 4K, 12-bit, Cineform master with After Effects. The master was brought into Premiere Pro where I added the ambient sounds and watermark and exported as 1080p H.264 video for the web. vimeo/aaronpriestphoto/campingbackyard2014
Posted on: Sun, 31 Aug 2014 17:15:08 +0000