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Dark-Sky Timelapse with Canon 24mm 1.4

Tom Lowe

Tom Lowe

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I had a great trip over the last few days up in the lower/eastern sierras, but I was mainly eager to try out my new Canon EF 24mm f/1.4 L - which I am also dying to try out on Red once this mount situation gets sorted out. Even stopped down to f/2, this lens is much faster than my EF-S 10-22 at f/3.5. It allowed me to cut my exposure time way down (as far as I wanted), which also had the effect of making my shot last longer while my camera panned with the Milky Way.

33MB H.264 MOV....

http://www.timescapes.org/mountains-720.mov

Settings: Canon 350D DSLR, ISO800, f/2, 30s, 5s intervals, .05 degrees pan per frame.

On RED, the 24mm is closer to being a 35mm prime, which could be useful for cinema and commercial work, especially in really low light at 1.4. I'm going to try to do some tests with this lens soon. Birger.... oh Birger...
 
Beautiful as always Tom. I look forward to these things and you never seem to disappoint. The addition of the motion control has been great. Many thanks.
 
Great work Tom! As you already know I am a HUGE fan of your work. The 24mm is a perfect lens for intervoltmeter shots. I also agreed with your suggestion (your comment on a previous reduser posting) regarding framing out a fast moving foreground.

Next time you decide to stay up all night see if you can shoot the stars and get them NOT to move as fast. Reason: Most of the TL that I see, especially my own naive work, always moved too quickly. I know "fast moving stars" is the meaning of night time lapse, i.e. constriction of time. You might be able to create some digital real estate for yourself and sell your footage many times over. My friend Sam Nicholson, ASC, who owns Stargate Digital, has built a fortune on what he calls digital real estate. As you know, night time star TL is locked in to the card write time speed, f stop, long shutter, ASA vs. noise, and the 15 degree per hour rotation of the earth. I would love to see a real, stationary and twinkling, star field used for background plates (green or blue screen) for a dialogue sequence in a feature film. We never get to see real stars (heavenly bodies not actors) in a movie. They are always generated and generated shots never look as amazing as the real deal. The file size of your 350 would be more than enough rez for a feature film.

If anyone could do this it would be you. You would have to write a program that would sync the camera settings (you know all of those settings by heart now) with the earth's rotation. Continue posting your work. We all love what you're doing and I agree with David Wilson that we "look forward to these things and you never seem to disappoint."
10.jpg



/Users/franciskenny/Desktop/10.jpg
 
Great work Tom! As you already know I am a HUGE fan of your work. The 24mm is a perfect lens for intervoltmeter shots. I also agreed with your suggestion (your comment on a previous reduser posting) regarding framing out a fast moving foreground.

Next time you decide to stay up all night see if you can shoot the stars and get them NOT to move as fast. Reason: Most of the TL that I see, especially my own naive work, always moved too quickly. I know "fast moving stars" is the meaning of night time lapse, i.e. constriction of time. You might be able to create some digital real estate for yourself and sell your footage many times over. My friend Sam Nicholson, ASC, who owns Stargate Digital, has built a fortune on what he calls digital real estate. As you know, night time star TL is locked in to the card write time speed, f stop, long shutter, ASA vs. noise, and the 15 degree per hour rotation of the earth. I would love to see a real, stationary and twinkling, star field used for background plates (green or blue screen) for a dialogue sequence in a feature film. We never get to see real stars (heavenly bodies not actors) in a movie. They are always generated, and generated shots never look as amazing as the real deal. The file size of your 350 would be more than enough rez for a feature film.

If anyone could do this it would be you. You would have to write a program that would sync the camera settings (you know all of those settings by heart now) with the earth's rotation. Continue posting your work. We all love what you're doing and I agree with David Wilson that we "look forward to these things and you never seem to disappoint."



/Users/franciskenny/Desktop/10.jpg
 
redsail said:
Great work Tom! As you already know I am a HUGE fan of your work. The 24mm is a perfect lens for intervoltmeter shots. I also agreed with your suggestion (your comment on a previous reduser posting) regarding framing out a fast moving foreground.

Next time you decide to stay up all night see if you can shoot the stars and get them NOT to move as fast. Reason: Most of the TL that I see, especially my own naive work, always moved too quickly. I know "fast moving stars" is the meaning of night time lapse, i.e. constriction of time. You might be able to create some digital real estate for yourself and sell your footage many times over. My friend Sam Nicholson, ASC, who owns Stargate Digital, has built a fortune on what he calls digital real estate. As you know, night time star TL is locked in to the card write time speed, f stop, long shutter, ASA vs. noise, and the 15 degree per hour rotation of the earth. I would love to see a real, stationary and twinkling, star field used for background plates (green or blue screen) for a dialogue sequence in a feature film. We never get to see real stars (heavenly bodies not actors) in a movie. They are always generated, and generated shots never look as amazing as the real deal. The file size of your 350 would be more than enough rez for a feature film.

If anyone could do this it would be you. You would have to write a program that would sync the camera settings (you know all of those settings by heart now) with the earth's rotation. Continue posting your work. We all love what you're doing and I agree with David Wilson that we "look forward to these things and you never seem to disappoint."
Click to expand...

Hey, well, getting this 24mm was your idea, Francis, so you can take some credit. :)

I definitely understand what you mean. I always watch those "starry night" scenes in movies very carefully to see how they are comped or matted. Contact is a great example, when Foster and McConaughey talk at Arecibo. I guess if your lens was wide enough and you were tracking the stars with very fast exposures, you could crop a legit star plate -- without resorting to FX. I'm waiting for the new 5Dm2 to come out. With that much resolution, plus the ability to shoot ISO3200, plus F/1.4, I could cut exposure times way, way down.

I wonder if there are any specialty lenses that might be even faster. Obviously there is the old-school Canon 50mm f/1.0, but I don't know if it's wide enough.

Thanks to everyone for the kind words.
 
if you really want the stars to "twinkle" you'd need a video frame rate, I believe. (of course it would be easy enough in post...)
The timelapse image is great stuff! Thanks for sharing it.

Other note: you say "On RED, the 24mm is closer to being a 35mm prime..." ?? I think Red will have approximately the same field of view (at least horizontally) as your Canon 350D. The sensor size (width) is very similar between the two.
 
Great work! Wonderful imagery.

Graeme
 
jbeale said:
if you really want the stars to "twinkle" you'd need a video frame rate, I believe. (of course it would be easy enough in post...)
The timelapse image is great stuff! Thanks for sharing it.

Other note: you say "On RED, the 24mm is closer to being a 35mm prime..." ?? I think Red will have approximately the same field of view (at least horizontally) as your Canon 350D. The sensor size (width) is very similar between the two.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I wasn't sure of the exact crop factor for Red + EF lenses. Is it 1.6? 1.5?

I think if you tracked the stars, as Francis suggested, you would just naturally get a twinkling effect from the atmosphere, wouldn't you?
 
Contact is a great example. Or Titanic. The stars look fake. Most people don't realize what they are missing. I enclosed the jpeg to make the point (although I know talking with you is preaching to the choir) about how much there is to see at night. It is pretty silly to make a film about life in another galaxy and then generate fake random stars behind the actors. I like your idea of shooting with a large format sensor then extract the background with a bit of tracking. That is about the simplest type of tracking. I also think that you are the right guy to write the application for tracking real time. It is a tricky program to write because the star fields move commensurate with what part of the sky you're shooting. And each sky moves differently. Next time you're out try a ten second shutter wide open with the 24mm. 800 asa. 5 frames a min. 300 frames for a ten second shot. It would take one hour if the card could process that quickly. That's 15 degrees an hour, one degree every 4 mins. or .25 degrees per min. (hope my math is correct!) That is if you could get the card to write 5 frames a min. If you use the Red for some daytime TL see what the different shutter speeds look like.

What's the word on Adobe and Red? Isn't there some news for us soon about this? Do you know anything? F

I have no idea when the 5Dm2 is coming out.

Keep those TL's coming. Eventually you are going to be recognized as "the go to guy" with this stuff. Look what you've done in the past year? F
 
frame size, star twinkle

frame size, star twinkle

Tom said:
Yeah, I wasn't sure of the exact crop factor for Red + EF lenses. Is it 1.6? 1.5?
Click to expand...

Red pixels are 5.39 microns in size so if you're shooting a 4096 pixel wide frame, the active sensor area on Red is 22 mm across. The Canon 350D sensor is 22.2 mm across, so the Red frame is nearly (99%) the same size as what you're getting now. Supposedly there will be a 4.5k Red recording mode eventually... if so, then the Red frame would actually be a bit wider than the Canon DSLR (although not as tall, the Canon having a 3:2 aspect ratio).

Tom said:
I think if you tracked the stars, as Francis suggested, you would just naturally get a twinkling effect from the atmosphere, wouldn't you?
Click to expand...

I think the star twinkle effect (stellar scintillation) caused by turbulence in the atmosphere is fast enough so any exposure time longer than (for example) 0.5 seconds will average most of it out. http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap000725.html
 
Tom, I must say that seeing the 24mm f/1.4 on a crop sensor, stopped down no less, offends my delicate sensibilities. ;-)

It really deserves to be on a full 35mm sensor shot wide open. (Corner softness? Coma? Vignetting? Bah.). I've been dying to try it on a D700 with a mount adapter, that would have easily 5 stops greater signal ratio than the 350D.

I'll be trying some more Milky Way time lapse at the Oregon Star Party later this month. The sky is so dark that the Milky Way itself casts a visible shadow.
 
I have herd stories about nikon coming out with a 24 megapixel DSLR

So far it has just been stories. Seems to come from one source. Not sure what or when that will happen. I am considering the D3 but will wait and see what developes by Christmas time.

I would go with Cannon but all my current glass is Nikon.
 
Daniel Browning said:
Tom, I must say that seeing the 24mm f/1.4 on a crop sensor, stopped down no less, offends my delicate sensibilities. ;-)

It really deserves to be on a full 35mm sensor shot wide open. (Corner softness? Coma? Vignetting? Bah.). I've been dying to try it on a D700 with a mount adapter, that would have easily 5 stops greater signal ratio than the 350D.

I'll be trying some more Milky Way time lapse at the Oregon Star Party later this month. The sky is so dark that the Milky Way itself casts a visible shadow.
Click to expand...

haha, just buy me a 1DsM3 and I will shoot some full-frame stuff to sooth your ruffled sensibilities. :)

You know, I might be up in that neck of the woods in Oregon around the time of that star party visiting my folks in Salem. I sure would like to get a crack at some truly dark skies. Only place around here for that is Death Valley, but it's still too hot now to shoot there. I've never been to a real "star party."

jbeale, that makes sense about the long exposures averaging out the twinkling. But who knows. Best bet to find out what the best option would be for creating a star background plate would probably be to shoot the thing in timelapse, using a telescope motor mount to track the stars, then crop out a 2- or 4K plate and see what it looks like playing at 24p. Then, you could also take a single frame from that timelapse, and use an FX program to "loop" the still shot into a video-like 24p that appears to be a "live" shot. Then see which looks better. It would be an interesting exercise.
 
Tom said:
You know, I might be up in that neck of the woods in Oregon around the time of that star party visiting my folks in Salem. I sure would like to get a crack at some truly dark skies. Only place around here for that is Death Valley, but it's still too hot now to shoot there. I've never been to a real "star party."
Click to expand...

Indian Trail Springs, where OSP is located, is a pretty high desert (5000 feet), so you'll be high above a lot of obscuring atmosphere. Plus, while your shutter is snapping away you can take a look through some of the telescopes. I'm sure there will be some big reflectors (3800mm f/4, etc.). Shoot me an e-mail if you can make it.
 
Tom said:
haha, just buy me a 1DsM3 and I will shoot some full-frame stuff to sooth your ruffled sensibilities. :)

You know, I might be up in that neck of the woods in Oregon around the time of that star party visiting my folks in Salem. I sure would like to get a crack at some truly dark skies. Only place around here for that is Death Valley, but it's still too hot now to shoot there. I've never been to a real "star party."

jbeale, that makes sense about the long exposures averaging out the twinkling. But who knows. Best bet to find out what the best option would be for creating a star background plate would probably be to shoot the thing in timelapse, using a telescope motor mount to track the stars, then crop out a 2- or 4K plate and see what it looks like playing at 24p. Then, you could also take a single frame from that timelapse, and use an FX program to "loop" the still shot into a video-like 24p that appears to be a "live" shot. Then see which looks better. It would be an interesting exercise.
Click to expand...



Don't wary Tom, if you get to visit Vegas stop by the Studios @ KETCHFRAME and I'll lend you my 1Ds III, but I absolutely Love the work you are doing with out one, just the same!

ciao
 
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