Mark Gee’s Great Astro Timelapse Tutorial For Beginners

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by Tim FokNovember 28^th, 2015

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Ever wanted to get into motion timelapse photography but a little overwhelmed by the whole process? Mark Gee has recently released a fantastic timelapse tutorial for beginners in collaboration with Syrp.

The YouTube tutorial covers astro timelapse in simple-to-digest but good detail, however many of the tips techniques can be translated into other types of timelapse.

Starting with how to setup your camera, Mark Gee takes you through the relevant notions for judging exposure, framing, post production and export.

I’ve read and watched many timelapse related tutorials in my time, but most reply on heavy investment of certain types of gear and/or great knowledge of timelapse. This video is easy to digest and understand with basic knowledge of camera operation and timelapse photography.

The Syrp Genie has been out for some time, it’s a cost effective, universal and reliable motion timelapse device. With a built in motor pan head and adaption to a cable based tracker, 2 axis timelapses are very easy to produce.

The length of the track is only limited by your piece of string, which not only is suitable for pretty much any slider system out there but also any type of DIY solution you wish to undergo.

Check out the product video for the Syrp Genie here:

There’s a fair bit of post production discussed in Mark’s tutorial; a large part of timelapse photography. Lightroom is used as the base program for photo editing, this is great software to use because of how well it deals with batch processing images.

The secondary piece of software is LR Timelapse. Having some experience with this program before I can concur it’s a very useful tool to have due to its specific timelapse nature and integration with Adobe Lightroom.

It’s used mostly as an export tool by Mark but the program has many more uses. Check out the below tutorial for a beginners look at the program and follow this link for more tutorials including keyframing for exposing changes through your timelapse (good for sunrise/sunset shots).

https://vimeo.com/126256818

Useful chapter links below for Mark Gee’s How to setup a motion star timelapse using the Syrp Genie in the field:

0:49 – Location Scouting – Mobile Apps | Composition
3:03 – Camera setup – Image Quality | Shutter | Aperture | ISO | Focus
4:33 – How to avoid star trailing
5:27 – Setup the Genie – Rec Time | Interval | Play Time
6:29 – How the interval works
7:43 – Setup the movement – Movement length | Ease in / out

Post Production:
8:20 – Introduction and workflow setup
10:32 – Color adjustments and neutralising the image
11:32 – Lens Correction
12:20 – Set black and white points
13:20 – Color adjustment – Clarity | Tone Curve
16:30 – Local Sky Adjustments – Graduated Ramp
19:37 – Technical Clean-up – Noise Reduction | Artifact clean up
22:47 – Sync color adjustments to all images
24:22 – Export all images to LR Timelapse
26:08 – Export out a movie from LR Timelapse – Codec | Output size