What is the best practice to handle making time lapse in a changing lighting conditions in the morning?

Question

I was trying to make a timelapse of a flower unfurling in the morning.

As the time progressed, the sun continued to rise and the ambient light became brighter and brighter, as you can see in the following photo.

At the end it is so bright the photo is basically white bright light.

I have set the aperture to 5.4. The F-stop was f/6.4. The shutter speed was set to 1/40. White balance was set to 'Bright Sun' (a setting in my camera)

The reason I did the above it that in my past timelapse exercises, if I do not manually set the above value and left some on auto, the changing light condition will lead to flickering (rapidly changing exposure between frames). But this fails miserably in this situation.

What I can do to handle this kind of environment/setting?

Answer 1

What you are trying to do is accomplished by a technique known as bulb ramping, or bramping (see: What is bulb ramping?), where the camera's exposure is gradually changed to accommodate changing lighting conditions. There are several commercial products and open source projects that bulb ramp cameras to create smooth timelapse sequences without jarring discontinuities in exposure.

Bramping is useful for the situation you are desiring, where the lighting conditions change gradually, and more importantly, predictably (i.e., sunsets, sunrises). For best results, bramping is used in conjunction with post-processing software that adjusts the images' exposures to smooth out unpredictable changes in lighting, such as passing clouds. Depending on the software, this exposure smoothing can be automatic, with the ability to tweak individual frames or sequences of frames.