Shoot and edit

Compose your shot

Set up your tripod and use Live View to refine your composition before finally locking your camera in place. Use single-point AF and AF-S to focus on your focal point or a third of the way into the frame. Ensure that you lock the focus to prevent hunting by switching to manual focus.

Camera settings

Set your metering to Matrix and select Aperture Priority so your shutter speed will alter to compensate for changing light conditions. We used f/11 for a suitably large depth of field and sharp details. Slightly higher ISOS (we used 400) will help prevent longer exposures when the light dips.

Load into layers

Once you’ve edited your images, hit Done. Highlight the whole sequence in Adobe Bridge and select Tools>photoshop>load Files into Photoshop Layers. Your sequence will now appear in Photoshop’s Layers panel. Click the panel and hit Cmd/ctrl+a to select all of the layers and select the Lighten blending mode.

Intervalometer

Enter the Photo Shooting Menu and select Interval Timer Shooting. This screen may look slightly different, depending on your camera. We set ‘Interval length’ to 30 secs and ‘No. of intervals x shots/interval’ to 1000 x 1, then simply stopped the camera once the sun had set.

Refine your edit

The time stack will now be visible and you can edit it further by hiding layers, or even masking and selectively hiding/revealing areas with a black/ white brush. Once you’re happy, hit Cmd/ctrl+alt+shift+e to create a merged copy of the visible layers and make any final edits.

Open and edit

Import your sequence into a folder on your computer and open it in Adobe Bridge. Press Cmd/ctrl+a to highlight the whole sequence, right click, and select Open in Camera Raw. Click the left panel in Camera Raw and hit Cmd/ctrl+a, any edits you make will now affect your whole sequence.