I began taking these photos a couple of weeks before Christmas but just finished the video this weekend. The workload finally became too much for my laptop so I had to upgrade to a new computer.

An interesting tidbit about these videos is they were all made without an intervalometer. Because they were night shots, I simply set my camera to low speed continuous mode and locked down the shutter. The average exposure is around five seconds. Here’s a brief description of the shots in order of appearance:

City Hall – They sometimes change the colors to fit the occasion in San Francisco. During the baseball playoffs last year, city hall stayed orange at night until after the Giants won the World Series. The people posing along the street are on their way to The Nutcracker at the War Memorial Opera House across from city hall, hence the music.

Cable Cars – Some of these are decorated with Christmas lights, which gave a cool effect when they were moving. I also like the large amount of holiday shoppers milling about.

Marina Boats – A couple boats had lights but I couldn’t get them to “pop” in the final edit. The Palace of Fine Art is in the background but barely visible. You can also see my shadow on the boat closest to the camera.

Fisherman’s Wharf Boats – These were more heavily decorated than the boats at the marina. The video by itself seems really frenetic, which is another reason I picked such an up tempo piece of music.

Skyline with Coit Tower – The only seasonal light in this shot is the bluish white one at the top of the Transamerica building. Still, it might be my favorite shot because of the different lights turning on and off in the houses and the Bank of America building.

Skyline from Pier 7 – I’ve been meaning to shoot from Pier 7 for some time, but this was my first time actually doing it. I would have used a wider lens if I had one, but I made sure to capture the seasonal outline lights on the Embarcadero Center buildings. While I was recording, I heard a burst of air and looked down to see a sea lion swim right below me. Somehow I forgot there might be condensation by the water and therefore didn’t bring a heater. There were no stores open nearby so I couldn’t buy a hand warmer and a rubber band for the lens. That’s why this shot slowly hazes over. I’ll make sure to try this shot again when I have the right equipment.

That’s it for now. I’m just glad I was able to post this video while it’s still winter.

I shot this video from San Francisco on Saturday morning. This is the last total lunar eclipse until 2014. The moon started going dark around 4:30am and stayed in the Earth’s shadow until just before it hit the horizon on the west coast. A brief outline of my workflow is below.

Photos – Taken with a Canon 60D with a Canon EFS 18-55mm lens set to 18mm. I used Av mode because the light changed from full moon to eclipse to daybreak. I used manual focus and disabled the image stabilizer. I had to use ISO 800 to keep the exposures under six seconds in order to keep the motion smooth without blurring the moon or stars.

Processing – All photos were shot in RAW, which meant 1300 photos took around fourteen hours to process. I chose a temperature that kept the moon white in the beginning but let it transition to red at the height of the eclipse. I used the Digital Photo Professional software shipped with the Canon 60D to convert the RAW files to jpegs. The size of the original RAW photos were around 30GB.

Video Processing – I used VirtualDub with MSU Deflicker to correct for minor light changes caused by shooting in Av mode. Frames were compiled at 25fps and compressed with Xvid.

There’s a bit of noise in the video because of the high ISO, but my attempts to eliminate the noise with Photoshop lead to more banding than I’d like. Both versions were around the same level of quality, so I went with the less processed version. If you have any other questions, please let me know.

I posted a video by Luke Shepard a few months ago featuring Paris at night. I’ve finally gotten around to posting a response to that video. This video was made with my old PowerShot so the quality isn’t great and I haven’t gotten down the technique well enough for a tutorial, but I think it offers a neat new way to make time-lapse videos.

I made the video by taking photographs on a tripod and focusing on a single point to keep it in the same place. I’d move the tripod a few inches, manually snap a photo, and then move it again. I then lined up the shots in VirtualDub using a free deshaker filter. I’ll post a deshaker filter tutorial sometime soon.

The first shot is coming out of a tunnel at the Conservatory of Flowers in Golden Gate Park. I tried to line up the finial at the top of the building as my focus point.

The next shot was made by walking away from the Francis Scott Key statue. I really like how this turned out. The clouds look good and the pan-out gives a sense of scale.

The fountain was the hardest to line up. VirtualDub couldn’t align the images because the background and lighting changed so drastically. I used Photoshop instead and lined up each photo with the one before it. Even this slow method didn’t give the result I wanted. I focused on lining up the lion’s head but the rest of the fountain wobbles a bit in the video.

Notre Dame? Oh yeah, we’ve got one of those. This shot was of Grace Cathedral on Nob Hill in San Francisco. There weren’t any clouds the day I went, so I cut this shot pretty short. If I had a wider lens, I would have included traffic and pedestrians to give a sense of time passing.

The final shot is of the Golden Gate Bridge. I used a polarizing filter, which really brought out the colors. It almost looks like HDR. I also like the lenticular clouds over the Marin Headlands.

The creators at Soviet Montage Productions used two Canon 5D Mark II cameras and a beam splitter to capture the same exact image in both cameras.  Expect to see much, much more of this effect on TV and in the movies.

Of course, I’ll have to try my hand at a cheap version of this once I buy or make a beam splitter.  I think this could work well with dark and light areas recorded at the appropriate levels and then masked in post.  Guess I’ll just have to wait and see.

I often joke that San Franciscans are more comfortable traveling to the East Coast than they are traveling to the east bay, but this gives me one more reason to cross the Bay Bridge.

Christen graciously answers some questions and goes into more detail on the original post.  He says he mostly used a Canon 40D but that he had to borrow a Canon 5D mk2 because his shutter broke.  As I’ve mentioned before, shutter fatigue is the main downside of using a DSLR, but there’s no way I could capture half the shots he did with my camera.

I took the photos for this video back in September but had a little difficulty creating a time lapse because I was using the new Windows Live Movie Maker.  Eventually, I gave in and used a combination of VirtualDub and the new Movie Maker.

I set my intervalometer to one second intervals and used about 900 photos for this video.  I adjusted levels with a VDub filter in order to counter the windshield glare and the general haziness of San Francisco.  I also brightened the video through Movie Maker.  I would have used a polarizing filter if I had one at the time of shooting.

The shoot goes from Berkeley, over the Bay Bridge, into San Francisco.

This was the third video I took but the only one, so far, with panning.  I still like the final result but it took too much effort to create.  In order to get the panning effect, I turned my camera on its tripod a little bit, snapped a photo, and then repeated.  It took about five minutes to take 114 photos.  I’m intrigued by the possibility of camera motion but other videographers get a smoother effect by using a motorized telescope mount (such as this one); something I’ll consider once I have $200-$300 to spend on time lapse.

This video was shot at the Embarcadero in San Francisco.

This was the second video I made. I was still using my camera’s built-in intervalometer so it took over three hours to capture the 183 photos used in this video. The one minute intervals didn’t allow me to capture the ships passing under the Golden Gate Bridge except as jittery shapes. This was my first use of a tripod, so my video was much less twitchy than the previous one.

If I had to do this again, I’d change the aspect ratio to 16:9, zoom in on the bridge, cut off the water in favor of the sky, and shoot at three second intervals. I’d also wait for a less hazy day.