One evening, a couple of weeks ago, I tagged along with a few work colleagues of mine who went out to shoot some long exposure photography down by Westminster Bridge at night. The view was stunning, as were the shots they took. It inspired me to go out and shoot some more night time-lapse. I’ve always loved London by night, particularly along the Thames and yet, with the exception of a few shots I took about 4 years ago, I haven’t shot any time-lapse of the city by night in the 6 years that I’ve lived here. Thus began a binge that consumed every evening that week.
This video is a selection of the best shots taken from that week. With the nights drawing in, this will hopefully be the first of many from some of my favourite London locations, and possibly the beginning of a prolonged binge... I fear my girlfriend may forget what I look like. Below is a run down of my process.
This video was shot using my Canon EOS 750D with the Sigma 18-35mm F1.8 DC Lens, an exceptional lens for the price that I haven't been disappointed by so far. I shot a frame every 4 seconds (compressing approximately 16 minutes into 10 seconds at 24fps) with a shutter speed of 1.6 seconds to achieve motion blur equivalent to a 90°-180° shutter angle. I shot entirely Raw which eats considerable card and hard drive space, but obviously, it allows for much greater control over the image especially with shadow and highlight detail. I imported each shot as image sequences into after effects after making adjustments in the Adobe Raw utility and then cropped and resized the frames to down to a more manageable 1920 x 817 frame. I exported each shot as an EXR sequence to maintain 16bit colour depth and imported into Davinci Resolve for the final Colour Grade. The above video is a breakdown of the process.