Dartmoor. A rugged landscape with bracken, ponies and us (briefly) yesterday. We stopped to have a picnic in the car by the side of the road and the view was so incredible that we had to take a photo…but then again the cloud movement looked cool, so we decided on a time lapse.
We set up a tripod with camera on top, manual exposure of a 20th of a second (so that cars would appear as blurs) and set it to take a picture every 30 seconds. Adding a neutral density graduated filter (a bit of glass that sits in front of the lens with a graduation from clear to dark) brought out the detail in the sky. As you can see from the result above, the bubbling clouds are pretty awesome, the ponies moving around are quite cool and we have a few cars occasionally, BUT…it’s very short. We only hung around for half an hour, and once you roll the footage up at 24 frames per second, you get a brief snapshot rather than an epic story. It would be lovely to spend a whole day on Dartmoor at some point to get a richer end product.
This is our third proper time lapse as Lightbulb Head – the first one was at our wedding (we’ll reveal it once we’ve added sound to it) and the second was of melting snow a couple of weeks ago. With each one we’ve learned new things; the main things we’ve noted from this one are the vignetting in the top left corner from the filter holder (schoolboy/schoolgirl error) and to remember that although the camera shoots in a 3:2 aspect ratio, we’ll want the final video in 16:9, which affects the composition. We’ll keep on trying though and we’ll share the results with you as we do.