Sunrise Time Lapse

Good morning everyone! We hope you wake up and enjoy this beautiful view which we were blessed to witness ourselves. This time lapse video was taken directly on the shores of Mati Davao Oriental at approximately 5am.  We chose a spot where turtle trails were seen overnight and worked together to check whether any eggs had been laid.

Trying to capture the sun rising was quite a difficult task due to the dynamic range of light as it transitions from dark to light. Every morning, the team combes the shoreline to check for any debris, marine life activities and general maintenance to ensure the beach shoreline is at its best everyday.  The early starts seem difficult to achieve however when you are greeted with such a beautiful view, you can’t help but get up!

I tried to keep up with the Amihan boys as they jogged early in the morning on the shoreline and needless to say, I was dragging behind them! You can be guaranteed that should you decide to do this for any prolonged period of time, your fitness levels and health would certainly improve dramatically!

Photography – Sunrise Time Lapse

I decided to create a time-lapse video footage to try and capture the feel of the morning.  At times one dramatic shot just doesn’t capture the grandeur of that particular atmosphere you are trying to share.  The beauty of time-lapse photography is that you can create a stream of images that draws the viewer more into your experience as well as the view.

I took the time-lapse with the Nikon D700 armed with the Nikon 18-35mm lens. Shot at F9 at 30mm, 1/200th, at iso200. I took a shot every 5 seconds using the timer function on the Nikon D700. I set the white balance on manual to ensure it was kept as constant as possible. The camera was kept stable on a gorilla pod dug deep into the sand looking toward the sunrise.  I also set up the size of the files to small as I knew that we would be capturing many images and didn’t need the huge file sizes when stitching so many together (each file was only a little over 1mb each).  This particular clip was comprised of 249 photos and stitched together on Aperture’s slideshow function, with each image given around 0.2 seconds of viewing to provide a viewing experience similar to around 24 frames per second.