Modjeska Grade Timelapse Session Tonight

23 June 2025, 8:11 p.m. — Shooting in the finest JPEG quality on this timelapse, aimed at the Modjeska Grade, which from my vantage point comes down between two electrical high tension towers.

Things should look interesting. Plan is to select frames from the shoot and describe them based on the time of day quality.

The lens is my Tamron 50-400, f6.3, ISO 1600 set up for aperture priority.

Here’s an example from the Grade, caught this vechicle’s lights in a blurr. This was shot just after sunset, at 8:40 PM during Blue Hour. Sunset was at 8:04 PM, so Blue Hour fits perfectly into this timeframe. No adjustments have been made to the images.

Modjeska Grade, shot from my backyard at 400mm, f/6.3, ISO 160, 8 second exposure. Although I mentioned the ISO being 1600 above, this was taken during the AUTO ISO portion of my shoot, so it adjusted itself to 160. Recall that low ISO is less noisy, but requires longer shutter speeds, thus the 8 second open time. I’m very pleased with the clarity and buttery smooth textures overall.

Same camera settings as above, also 8 seconds.

This wasn’t planned, but when doing timelapse, you get so many individual frames to pick through. What really speeds up the process is DaVinci Resolve, since it packs 4000 individual frames into a single clip that is easily scrolled through on the timeline.

Overall, the timelapse itself was a fail. The dogs were dancing on the deck where the camera is set up, and at 400mm, the tiniest wiggle causes vibration… and things just weren’t looking good.

We live to fight another day, and take into consideration all the things we’ve learned from today’s adventures.

Lastly, because it’s the end of this post, here’s the short YouTube video of the above, edited to show the cars going up and down the grade.