I wanted to create an image that blended many different moments of sunset into one. For that, I spent about 45 min taking 571 photos 😫. Because I’m using an older camera for today’s standards (Sony α6000) without a strong dynamic range, I decided to do 5-shot 0.3EV brackets. I then combined a bunch of those HDR photos in a single file that acts like a “long exposure” using Median calculations in Photoshop. In total, I made 6 different “moments” of light.
Those 6 photos were stacked, and then masked so a progression of time would be shown, the earliest one on the left and the latest one to the right.
After the sunset was over, I also did a quick panoramic image of the view.
Fun Fact: If you pay attention to the window in the building closest to the camera, you’ll see my shadow (heads/shoulders/arms) holding the camera.
Lessons learned:
- Doing a bracket with less images and bigger exposure gap (3 images and 0.7EV or even 1EV gap), might help the computer handling the files later and also make smaller files (your notebook was not happy during the editing process).
- When the camera falls asleep, the zoom and focus resets. That’s very frustrating. Figure out if there’s a way of prolonging that in the future.
- For the median stack long exposure simulation, smaller images with less time in between them work better when the action happens only once. The clouds movement wasn’t smooth because there was a high gap between the images. That wouldn’t be a problem with water in a waterfall or a river flowing through the image.
- Turn your lights off if the wall in front of you will be visible in the image.
