Haleakalā Clouds

[Mike Lewis]

So I had grand ideas of some time-lapses from the top of the crater in Haleakalā National Park. But due to a number of reasons, all I got was a very short and heavily cropped 8 seconds of video. Enough to show the potential but not really all that compelling. A number of things conspired to thwart my original ideas:

• I rented a Sigma 14mm f/1.8 lens for the Maui trip, pretty much just to take up to Haleakalā for some wide time-lapses and nightscapes. It arrived in time for the trip, travelled in my luggage (insured) safely to Maui, and then stayed in my suitcase the day we went to the park (left in my luggage in the room). Sigh. I would like to say that such gaffes are out of the ordinary for me, but I cannot exactly say that. So that was the first issue with my time-lapse/nightscape plans.
• Parking at the summit was problematic. We ended up not at the very top but at the visitor's center parking lot. Not that much lower, but with a view that looked out right over the road. This meant I had to crop out some foreground to eliminate signs, cars driving through the frame, and some other non-photogenic foreground elements. In retrospect the 14mm would have been even worse in this regard, actually.
• I planned to set up and run the sequence until the sun set. But I quickly realized I was not comfortable having the focused sun in the frame of my mirrorless camera for such a long time with no clouds to attenuate it ( a disadvantage to being ABOVE the clouds for sunset I guess). I was not going to chance damaging my sensor on my reasonably new R5. I will have to do some more research on this to try to ascertain what might be safe in a case like this. But the result of this decision was I had to end the time-lapse before the sun entered the frame. That meant that even running at 24 fps as I rendered here I only got about 8 seconds of video. Not enough video to bother with any music or the like.
• There were so many folks walking about around and in front of my tripod I was really worried my camera was going to be kicked over. It was the farthest thing from the intended relaxing experience that I was actually glad to stop shooting and safely stow my camera away.
• The same error mentioned above meant we did not stay too long after sunset to shoot any true nightscapes. I got some colorful frames where the longer camera exposure pulled out some colors after the sun was down much better than the eye could detect. In retrospect that would likely have made a more compelling time-lapse.

So with all of that whining out of the way here is the video. Is it rendered in the eval version of LRTimelapse, which constrains it to be a 1080P video but which does a positively masterful job in reducing any flicker effects IMHO. If I ever actually get some data worthy of it I will probably be buying the licensed version.

Not sure how I link in the small thumbnail version of the video?


EDIT: I guess that is the way...
ML

 

[Ben Egbert]

Hey Mike how about me, I forgot how to get into video mode this morning for a time lapse. I ltterfigured it out, you need to press info when in the mode screen. But I missed my time lapse.
this does have great potential and I rnjoyrd the short clip

 

[AlanLichty]

Fun clip even if it did end up a bit on the short side.

 

[JimFox]

Very cool Mike! So since you were using LRTimelapse, I am guessing you shot individual frames? What was your interval. The R5 has exposure smoothing built in from what Ben and Jameel have said. So you shouldn't need LRTimelapse for flickering, since you should be able to capture without flicker. One for sure method no matter what the camera is, especially if you aren't shooting through sunrises and sunsets is to simply shoot it in total manual.

It's too bad it was so short, as those clouds moving are pretty cool. You almost could create a looping gif off this one.

 

[Ben Egbert]

Jim, the R5 does not have exposure smoothing in interval timing, only in the internal video based timelapse. I sure wish it did.

 

[Mike Lewis]

Jim,

The interval was 10 seconds. The smoothing would largely not have been needed, since this scene was pretty stable, except that right about in the middle I decided I needed to change exposure, and then after like 3 or 4 frames decided that was a mistake and changed it back. That produced a sp[ike that manual editing still could not really smooth out, but LRTimelapse did the trick nicely.

Interesting idea about the gif, I may have to see if I can do that.

ML

 

[Jameel Hyder]

That looks nice Mike. Must have been fun watching in person.