Night to Day Time Lapse
 

As a general rule, I'd think a day to night time lapse is somewhat easier...set the manual iris...let it go to black as the sun sets. But what about night to day? Since you can't know exactly how intense the rising sun light will be, how do you capture the dark to light transition properly, while retaining the drama?

In a shoot yesterday, we were trying to capture the light transformation on the east-facing front of a bakery. I put in one level of ND, and guessed at an F8 setting...which ended up being a stop or two low.

At the risk of Doug's head exploding at the mention of TLCS...would this be an appropriate situation for it, or is there a better way?

Re: Night to Day Time Lapse
 

TLCS is how I would do it. As it's timelapse you can afford to use the full 250th shutter and I would limit gain to +6db if you want to capture some detail in the dark part or zero if your not bothered by the night portion. Set the response time to the slowest setting.

Re: Night to Day Time Lapse
 

THAT made me laugh out loud! ;-)

dave

Re: Night to Day Time Lapse
 

One other suggestion - make your interval between frames long enough that you can quickly change your exposure parameters between exposed frames if you need to...
(I've done time lapses where I've actually switched into or out of an ND filter between frame exposures with minimal if any noticeable change in the picture - especially if DOF is not an issue in the shot)
Another thing to keep in mind is that at some point you may want to move into a more manual setting - particularly if you have a lot of sky - or the sun or even a bright reflection - in your shot that's fooling your auto exposure system, or conversely if there are certain kinds of fluctuations that you would like to keep - such as the case of a wider shot where the sun going in and out of partial clouds looks better when the foreground reflects the actual brightness change, rather than having the sky in the background getting lighter and darker as the cameras exposure settings chase the brightness of the foreground.
Of course this is also where the added lattitude of an F3 with s-Log would really come in handy...