I have two favorites....let me share one of them with you.

I captured one sunset with my Super-8 camera after spending all night out in Rocky, Mountainous, Terrain, with a girl named Lori.

I set up my time-lapse / time-exposure camera, and shot the sky at night in time-exposure mode...

Lori was a good buddy of mine, so when the police showed up at 3 in the morning to ask what we were doing all alone on the crest of a mountain...

I proudly pointed to my camera against the moonlight sky and said, I'm filming!

Lori had gone to sleep inside of her Suburban.

The police poked around with their flashlight inside Lori's suburban.

Convinced that I truly was a film nerd and that Lori was safe, and that we had no beer or drugs, they left us, presumeably in search of beer or drugs....(kidding)

The next morning, I got the best woody, er, sunrise imaginable.

I waited until the teeny tiny tip of the sun's rays floated over the rocky mountain landscape in the distance....

I tilted my camera while nearly in telephoto mode until I had captured the bottom of the mountain only , with my camera in auto-exposure mode, I set my camera to 9 frames a second to let more light in...and started filming...

I started at the base of the mountain, I barely had enough light for Kodachrome 40....(the 9FPS speed lets in an additional one stop of light, and it made all the difference)

I slowly (to compensate for being undercranked) tilted my camera up the mountain, keeping the sun in my peripheral view while my camera simply embraced the rolling mounds of the mountain....

....as my camera reached the crest of the mountain, and the sun now peeked into my frame, the two police officers appeared in my shot and gave me the finger.

Ok, I made that last part up...sorry.

As my cameraframe crested the mountain, and said hello to the newly sprouting sun, my auto exposure meter began to rise from the new source of intense backlight.

I was ready, I locked the camera exposure off by switching it to manual just after the sun hit the Lens.

With my meter now locked off at F 11-16, (the automatic light meter had risen all the way from F 1.8 because of the sun, I stopped it from going any higher and ruining the shot from underexposure) I simultaneously locked off my tripod head.

I then switched my camera to time-lapse mode.

The effect created was a shot that starts in real time at the bottom of the mountain, then tilts up and reveals the sun just coming over the horizon in the distance, and suddenly the sun rises quickly (but not to quickly) due to the time-lapse effect.

It worked!

-Alex


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[This message has been edited by Alex (edited September 03, 2001).]