Shooting a timelapse of a sunset was my first attempt at doing timelapse photography. I do not recommend anyone getting into timelapse photography to follow my lead, as it’s probably the hardest type of timelapse to shoot. Having said that, if you can master sunset timelapses, you won’t have much difficulty with other timelaspes.
Although post processing is essential to smoothing out exposure changes, it’s extremely important to constantly watch your exposure when shooting a sunset, as when the sun is setting, your exposure changes quite quickly. To avoid excessive noise in the resulting movie, it’s best to shoot RAW and keep your camera exposure between -3 and +3 of the ideal exposure.
There were 20+ different exposure changes in this timelapse. You can notice some excessive noise at the 39 second mark in the video and some jumps where the battery died and needed to be changed, which is also something that needs careful watching.
To learn techniques to smooth out exposure changes, check out these links: Night to Day Timelapse and Holy Grail Method
