Re: Stunning Time-Lapse Video of Yosemite National Park

(Maybe not "stunning" for those that have spent a little time in Yosemite)

http://news.discovery.com/earth/time-lapse-video-yosemite-national-park-120125.html

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The cure for a fallacious argument is a better argument, not the suppression of ideas.
-- Carl Sagan

Franky,
You can also see that video here:
http://yosemitenews.info/forum/read.php?3,50554



It is a beautiful video regardless. The night shots are truly amazing.
In a zillion nights I've seen the Milky Way often... but rarely like
it was captured... but then again the camera tends to see more light than our
eyeballs... seen the same phenom with night shots I've taken.

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D'oh!
I searched back several days but apparently not far enough.

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The cure for a fallacious argument is a better argument, not the suppression of ideas.
-- Carl Sagan

Funny how that works. I was amazed the first time I got back and really looked at my night shots...nothing like what I saw with my eyes.

Image stacking (I doubt they did that here) can make for some even more incredible shots.

I was struck by the camera movement (slow panning). It seems like a technically challenging task to smoothly coordinate that movement with the time lapse capture of the subject. But I am not a camera expert and maybe it is a trivial task.

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The cure for a fallacious argument is a better argument, not the suppression of ideas.
-- Carl Sagan

No, you're correct... it is difficult. It can be done manually with various mechanical contraptions (cheaper, sometimes) or it can be done with computerized systems. With even the simplest of mechanical trackers (such as a "barn door tracker" the rotation of the earth can be accounted for well enough to do reasonably long exposure times (a few minutes or more) at lesser focal lengths. With a top-notch computerized tracker, people can do exposure times for as long as their camera allows and at longer focal lengths.

Everything I just said is an oversimplification, but my point is to confirm that it is quite difficult to do astrophotography using ultra-long exposures. Stacking helps eliminate the "trailing" by allowing for the stacking of exposures rather than using one, longer exposure, but it's not a perfect solution. I'd like to get into the hobby someday, and I'll probably build a barn door tracker just to gain more appreciation for the astrophysics behind the necessity for using one.

*edit*

It just struck me that you were referring to the original video and the physical panning of the camera. Yes, that's also difficult, and works in similar principal to what I described with the astrophotography... only the camera is the Earth and Yosemite is the cosmos, heh. It's generally done using a mechanized dolly and an expensive, highly precise tripod head.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/26/2012 07:15PM by dqniel.

Quote
Frank Furter
I was struck by the camera movement (slow panning). It seems like a technically challenging task to smoothly coordinate that movement with the time lapse capture of the subject. But I am not a camera expert and maybe it is a trivial task.

Here is a link to a video of how they did it:

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Old Dude



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/26/2012 08:53PM by eeek.

Quote
Frank Furter
I was struck by the camera movement (slow panning). It seems like a technically challenging task to smoothly coordinate that movement with the time lapse capture of the subject. But I am not a camera expert and maybe it is a trivial task.

There are quite a few rigs out there to do it. Here is just one http://dynamicperception.com/

Those are long exposures, probably 10-30 seconds, that is why the milky way is so vibrant. String them together to make a movie, it's the only way to shoot video at night.