What
Captured this day to night sunset sequence of the World Trade Center back in the day of shooting time lapse with motion picture cameras and film.
Who
I chased this shot for 3 weeks with the help of Dan Zafir. It got to be a bit of an obsession, to capture the right light from the right angle with the right weather. It so happened we failed at this about 4 or 5 times dues to weather suddenly changing, not being able to access the location, and a few other reasons, till one day the pieces fell into place.
How
We used a rare re-purposed Mitchell 16mm reflex camera with a Norris Intervalometer & integrated spot meter shooting a frame every 5 seconds. Digital was not even a ‘thing’ at the time, and the Mitchell camera was a beast. We spent quite a bit of time calculating exposures over the course of the day to night transition, loaded up a stack of ND’s in front of the lens and started shooting. We pulled ND’s are the light transitioned and finally let the light meter handle the exposure time for each frame as dark settled in with the last frames being exposed for around 4 seconds. We were spot metering the side of the WTC from about a mile away and it all worked this time.