Clouds in Time-lapse Photography: The Unseen Sea

The Unseen Sea, a timelapse video by San Francisco, California based photographer, Simon Christen, has gone viral on Vimeo, racking up over 1.5 million views since it has been posted. The camera work seen here took place at various locations throughout San Francisco over the course of a year. Sit back, relax, and take a moment to enjoy:

“It’s mostly shot with a Canon 40D except one shot. The last fog wave one was shot with the 5D mk2 because that night my shutter on the 40D crapped out,” Christen noted. As far as lenses, Christen says he used a combination of  either a Canon 10-22mm, 24-70mm, or a 70-200mm.

“I am always shooting in full manual mode and then adjust the exposure as the light changes. The exposure really varies depending on the shot. For example a bright city needs shorter shutter speeds then fog illuminated by moon light. The night shots take a little while to capture all the light. For example the fog waves hitting the hills was shot at ISO 640, f/2.8 and I believe 4sec shutter speed. As the light changes I just keep adjusting either one of these settings. The shutter speeds ends up being around 4-5 sec with the aperture wide open and high ISO settings. I take care of the “jumps” later in post. This way I get to take a picture every 5-6 seconds.”

The “jumps” he mentions are edited out manually in Adobe After Effects and Adobe Premier  using the Curve Filter, and then gone over a second time using Granite Softwares GBDeflicker filter.

For Further Training on Time-lapse Photography:

Check out this new COMPLETE guide (146 pages) to shooting, processing and rendering time-lapses using a dslr camera. It can be found here: Time-lapse Photography Guide

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