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day to night

How to shoot a night-to-day transition in a single take with some lighting trickery

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We’re not talking about the timelapse holy grail here. We’re talking video. One of the most difficult things to do in film is to show the passing of time in a single shot. There are many ways to do it, but rarely is it all caught in the same take.

This video from the folks at Aperture’s A-Team shows us how it can be done with a little forethought and some fancy trickery with your lighting setup. It’s actually not as difficult as you might think, although it definitely takes some planning and there are one or two tips that can help improve your odds of pulling it off.

This perfect day-to-night shot took over 18 months to make

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The beauty is in simplicity, but even simplicity takes a whole lot of effort and planning. Mark Duffy’s fantastic day-to-night image of a sundial is the perfect example of this. While it was composed from two photos only, it took Mark over 18 months to get it exactly as he imagined. So how did he do it? He shared a bit of the information about the photo with DIYP and revealed why it took so long to make it.

How to shoot a day-to-night transition, the holy grail of timelapses

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The day-to-night transition has been the holy grail for timelapse photographers since timelapse first became a thing. What makes it difficult is rather obvious. The exposure is constantly changing as time passes. But dealing with that change in exposure over the course of an hour or two is not so straightforward.

But it’s not impossible to achieve, and there are various ways to do it, as David Bergman discusses in this video. Each of the methods has their own advantages and disadvantages, and which technique you’ll use will depend on your own judgement. But this will give you a great starting point to make your own.

How I stitched 105 exposures to create a 620MP night-to-day panorama of New York City

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Created from 105 individual exposures taken over many hours, “New York Transitions I” captures the dawn of a new day in New York City. I wanted to portray the magic of the skyline at both nighttime and daytime in a single image so I planned to create a VAST photo that transitioned from night to day as you move from left to right in the image. Furthermore, I wanted to create the photo at a special time when the city looked particularly radiant, so I waited for a snowstorm to gild the city in white…

Heavy clouds thick with snow blanketed the sky on an unusually cold morning. After reviewing the forecast for many inches of snow followed by a sudden clearing of the sky at night, I decided to prepare for a photoshoot of the city from the top of one of the tallest buildings between downtown Manhattan and the iconic Midtown Manhattan skyline.

How to turn daytime into night in photoshop

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Recently I created a series of composite images around my home town. I shot the locations early one morning, then shot the models a week later in my home studio. One of the images was going to show a couple out at night, walking past the city nightlife. Being one not to make things easy on himself, I decided I would shoot the location in daylight, and change it to night. Now I know I will probably get lots of comments, which I have already on Facebook, saying why didn’t you just shoot it at night. The answer is I didn’t want to. I wanted to challenge myself. I knew I would learn some valuable lessons whilst doing this. This is how we grow. Also the location would have been a nightmare to shoot at night. It is usually full of drunk people enjoying the beer of the city.

So without further ado, lets play God, and turn day to night! But before we start here is a speed edit of the whole image!

Photographer captures time by compositing an entire day in a single image

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Unless you’re shooting really really long exposures, a photograph captures just the tiniest slice of time.  Timelapse can help to speed up time and show us great durations in just a few minutes.

For fine art photographer Stephen Wilkes, shooting hundreds of photographs over the course of up to 30 hours at a time perched in a cherry picker and compositing elements from different frames together in post over several months is how he created each of these day to night sequences that show a full day in a single image.

How to shoot a moving day to night timelapse (With a Canon body and a Nikon lens)

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Time lapses that transition from day to night (or vice versa) are considered the Holy Grail of time lapses. Aside from the actual tactics of taking a time lapse you add in the added complexity of changing light. I’ll admit that it can be quite intimidating to even try.

This  video from Mark Thorpe make it look all to easy though. It is 15 minutes long, but it is packed with some tips that I’ve never seen before, so its definitely worth the time. Aside a Genie mini which mark uses for motion, he uses quite an interesting camera+lens combo. If you are strongly hooked on either Nikon OR Canon, you may wanna look away, as Mark shoots a 5Dmk3 with a 14-24 Nikon lens.

How to Shoot and Edit Day to Night Time-lapses Using LR Timelapse

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One of the more recent trends in time-lapse videos has been capturing the transition from day to night. While the process might seem like a difficult one, it’s fairly straightforward once you have down the basics.

To teach you those basics, photographer/cinematographer Cal Thomson has created this helpful tutorial.

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