Time-Lapse Photography at Night

Hi, I'm Jason Hatfield, professional outdoor photographer, and right now I'm in the beautiful mountains of Crested Butte, Colorado. One of my favorite things to capture is the stunning night sky we have here. And I'm gonna show you how to do it with a Sony camera. It's really simple, you won't need a motorized slider or head and all you'll be using is a built-in app. You're going to need a tripod, a camera, and a fast lens like the 16-35 f/2.8. You're gonna wanna use an app like PhotoPills, TPE or Star Walk to find out where your Milky Way is gonna be. I like to see the Milky Way as it tracks through the night sky. If you're in PhotoPills, going to go down here to night AR. That's going to pull up a simulation of the night sky. I use that to determine where the Milky Way is going to rise. And right now our Milky Way is over this way. If I scroll with my finger, you'll see the Milky Way move throughout the night. So now I know if I'm pointing in this direction that I'll be able to capture the Milky Way as it goes from left to right. Now I'm going to go ahead and set up my camera and get it ready to capture the night sky here. I typically like to extend my tripod legs just a little bit so that they're more stable overnight, in case I get any heavy wind, rain, something else that might brush against it and knock it over. Once I've got that ready, I used a leveler on my Sony camera here to make sure I have a level horizon, and then get my composition. I like to go nice and wide at 16 millimeters, get a little bit of the mountain foreground, so these peaks off here in the distance, and then get my night sky which will capture the stars, the Milky Way, and most of the clouds that are going to move out here. So now that I have my composition, I want to make sure I'm in manual mode. And we're going to be set in the settings right now for the night sky. Obviously right now, it's going to be blown out. The sky's going to be completely, as you can see the zebras I have here, completely without detail. So I'm going to go ahead and take my aperture down to f/2.8, that's going to give me a nice, wide open aperture. And then I like to be around 15 seconds with this camera, it's that Sony a7R III. Because of the high amount of megapixels, when I get over 15 seconds, I start to see a little bit of motion in my stars, a little bit of a trail to them. And you can even see it at 15 seconds, but that is pretty minimal at that point. I also want to make sure I have my ISO turned up here and 3200 is a good starting number for ISO. Sometimes you might need to go a bit higher or a little bit lower depending where you're at. We have really, really dark skies here in Crested Butte. So these settings at 15 seconds, f/2.8, and ISO 3200 work out really well. So with this camera then I want to go into what's called the interval shoot function. In the older Sony cameras, there's an app in the Sony PlayMemories. And that app, the time-lapse app, is what you'll be using. And here with the interval shoot function, I'm going to go in and set all my settings. I want to have my shooting start time to one second. That means I want it to start as soon as I press that shutter button. I want my intervals set to one second. That basically means I want it the lowest interval possible so it continues to take one picture after another. And then number of shots, this is where it's kind of up to you how many you want to capture. Set to 600. If I turn that into a 30 frame per second video, when played back, that'll be 20 seconds worth of video. So we're going to go ahead and go with 600, depending on how long the night sky is the time of year you're shooting, it might be lasting, you know, more than 12 hours, less than 12 hours, you could go higher than that number or lower than that number. The AE tracking sensor that you see here, that's not going to apply because we're in manual mode so it won't adjust any settings and we don't want it to adjust any settings cause we want it to just capture the settings that we put in. So you go over here to the next setting and that's your silent shoot interval. We want to make sure that's set to on cause that's going to help give you a better life when it comes to your shutter. As opposed to making it click every time, it's just going to use an electronic shutter. That's not going to be an issue at all for what we're doing here. So once that's all set, we're going to go up here to interval shooting, select on. And then once we press our shutter button, it'll say standby and it will start taking our time lapse. And if you want to make sure your camera runs all night, you'll want to use a battery like this one right here. It's 10,000 milliamps and it'll last you for multiple nights. I often take it with me backpacking just for that reason. I also use a rain cover like this one to make sure my camera's protected from any sudden rainstorms. Once you're done, come back, get your camera, download your images into your favorite photo app. And then use a third-party app like Adobe After Effects or the one that I use, LRTimelapse. Compile that and you'll have an amazing film of the night sky.