treadwl Loc: South Florida

For some time now I've been planning on taking a Dawn to Dusk photo. I've seen an example at a National Geographic Exhibit and want to give it a try. The idea is to place a camera on a tripod to view a scene from roughly just south of the rising sun on the left and to just before the setting sun on the right. You then take a multitude of photos throughout the day and then blend slices of them together to produce a finished image. This could be as many as a hundred images. The end result will yield a dark predawn look on the left side and could finish with some starlight on the right side. If I do this next week (weather permitting) I will be shooting for about 13 hours.

The sample I saw at the gallery was taken with a 12mm lens (which I do not have). I was a bit put off by the 12mm effect which left a decent foreground, but,in my opinion a very diminished background that was really just sky. My thought was to use my 24-70m lens in the vertical position at 24mm focal length. Then as the day moved on to, in small increments, slowly pan the lens to the right. This would produce a taller vertical image yet give me the wide horizontal view (when everything is blended together) that I will need to capture dawn to dusk.

I will only be able to shoot one of the above options during the day, so I'm asking which do you think will work best and do you have any other advice before I start this endeavor?

I will post the results when ever I get this done---but with all the blending---this is going to take a while.

Thanks for your thoughts in advance.

BassmanBruce Loc: Middle of the Mitten

Larry, sounds like fun and you just talked me into giving it a shot.
Two thing come to mind, you could easily preview this by going to your intende location and stitch a bunch of panos, this will give you your final composition and you visualize the day long pattern.
Also consider giving it a seasonal look depending on date by what you include.

big-guy Loc: Peterborough Ontario Canada

IMO I would treat this as a multi-day project with day one as a trial then refine and carry on. I would definitely try the vertical pano approach, leveled tripod of course, using the sun dead center as your guide to panning. On trial one just shoot 1 photo per hour, using manual exposure only, and merge the 12 to 14 shots in LR pano and see what you end up with. I'm suspecting LR should blend fairly well but it may not. If it does, great. If not you will need to slice and dice manually but save that for trial 2 or 3. Once you get it down to almost done then try 1 shot every 15 minutes. This will certainly take some time for LR so be prepared to set it and come back the next day considering you should have 48 to 56 shots to process. Hopefully you won't have to do the slice and dice routine.

As an added note, make sure you don't have too much sky in the shots as the clouds will certainly change and make it hard to blend both for LR or you.

Note: change LR to your program of choice as needed.

I'm very interested to see your results.

Rich1939 Loc: Pike County Penna.

This is a very good idea! You will see how your set up works in a matter of minutes what would otherwise take all day

repleo Loc: Boston

Sounds like a great experiment. Do please post the results. I'm trying to figure out how the blending will work with shadows as the day progresses.

treadwl Loc: South Florida

Don't worry----I'm trying to figure it out as well. :-)

R.G. Loc: Scotland

It might be an idea to not use auto WB. If WB floats between shots it could give you a nightmare to sort out in PP. But presumably you would want the exposure floating so that it would track the changing light. Leaving the exposure settings fixed would probably not result in the wide range of light levels being captured in a usable way.

treadwl Loc: South Florida

Thanks for the thought. I'll be sure to turn it off.

tommystrat Loc: Bigfork, Montana

Super creative idea - and I agree with the vertical pano approach. Can't wait to see the results!

photogeneralist Loc: Lopez Island Washington State

I did something kind of similar, Snow was predicted. I set my camera up inside the front window on a tripod with a prime (Non zoom) lens so zoom creep wouldn't interfere with the desired identical framing of the photos. The first shot was in the sunlight pre snow front arrival. Then another as the opposite shoreline in the distance was obscured by snowflakes and a few scattered flakes were falling in our yard. Shots followed shots as the snow conditions changed. The snow event only lasted about 4 hours then the sun came out on the fallen snow. It took two days before the snow melted or sublimated and the unveiling of the yard/lawn was very gradual so the interval between photos was much longer.
The result? None of the photos is a strong photo that would stand by itself but the series is interesting and even a little compelling.

If someone can tell me how to easily attach more than 1 photo per topic, I'd be happy to share an abbreviated vision of the snow series in another posting. (I know it can be done cause so many postings have multiple images.)

R.G. Loc: Scotland

You start the process of attaching a photo by clicking on "Choose file", locate and select the file, click on "(store original)" if you want the full size version available for download and then finish the process by clicking on "Add Attachment" and waiting for the upload to complete. Repeat this process for each image that you want to attach.