Hey everyone

Just joined this awesome page and have a question. I was shooting my first night time hyperlapse (of Tower Bridge in London).
It was night time but a lot of lights from the bridge, buildings, street lights and xmas lights. I used F/22 and a 6 second exposure. I had the ISO at 100 and everything was at full manual mode.
Now I heard that one should always try and avoid F/22 while shooting timelapses. But how could I have done it differently to still get a good quality night time image with a wider aperture? Should I use an ND filter even though it's night time?

Thanks in advance for any responses!

I try and avoid f/11 or above because you can see sensor spots - f/8 is the sweet spot for most lenses. that said I don't think you want to be using an ND or any filter at night because lights shining in the lens can create internal refections.

TimT

I also try to avoid higher apertures, also because of the dust spots and like in f22 the image starts to lose sharpness because of diffraction:
(http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutor ... tion.shtml)
By the way you can remove dust spots in post at After Effects, in case you didn't know:
http://magictimelapse.blogspot.co.uk/20 ... after.html

Sometimes I will boost up to F16 if I know my lens is clean, but only to get more pronounced sun flair (which can also be achieved with star filters). Unless you are going for a 6sec streaking effect perhaps best to lower your shutter speed? That way you don't have to wait 6sec before moving the camera also.

On many lens/camera combinations - apertures smaller than f/16 will start to lose sharpness due to diffraction effects. It's a serious concern if you're doing large prints. But since you're presumably going to downsize this to 1080p video anyway - probably not a big deal.

And I'm assuming you actually *want* a 6-second exposure time, correct?