MC Perspective: An aircraft carrier can do this?!

MC3 Alex Delgado just got out to the fleet and he's already making waves.  This guy's got some talent.  Check out this time lapse he just shot while aboard USS Dwight D. Eisenhower.  It was even picked up by CNN!

Watch the video below and read on for more details about the shoot.

You can watch the video on the ship's Facebook page here.

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I AM YOUR EYES:  Where is this?

DELGADO:  This was shot in Portsmouth, Va when Ike broke suction from the pier at Norfolk Naval Shipyard and went out to the Atlantic. It was first time the ship went underway since 2013, so it was an important event to try and capture, so I went as high as I could to get a good vantage point. That ended up being the O-10 level.

"I should have brought more snacks and 

some extra memory cards."

I AM YOUR EYES:  What was it like?

DELGADO:  It was long!  I had to run down to our shop to procure some extra memory and food. The photos took up a little over 100GB at the end of the day! I had to batch edit all of the photos and save them to a new location. That process took about 10 hours.  Then I put it all into after effects, which automatically puts the sequence of photos in the framerate I needed. The rendering and exporting took about another 5 hours to complete.

All in all, it was great experience to be up there as the ship went underway for the first time in a long time.  Definitely want to thank D'Andre Roden, an MC on the Vinson, for giving me the inspiration. He did a sweet timelapse on the Vinson a while back and got my gears turning.

"The process was long, but extremely rewarding."

I AM YOUR EYES:  What kind of equipment did you use?

DELGADO:  Everything was shot on the Nikon D810 with a 14-24mm F/2.8 lens.  I also used an intervalometer that took 7,000 photos over the span of 6 hours. You can get a pretty good one at B and H for about $50.

I AM YOUR EYES:  Tell us about your camera settings.

DELGADO:  The challenge was trying to decide what interval to use between each shot. I started with 3 seconds, then decided 2 seconds would be better. To be honest, I came to that decision on a hunch.

As for the camera mode, I used aperture priority to help during the transition from dusk to daylight at the beginning of the video. That mode automatically meters for the light in the frame so you don't end up getting over exposed images.

The downside is that it causes flicker in the overall timelapse. Which means the camera shoots different exposed photos throughout your timelapse. To fix it, you need to use a deflicker software, which I didn't have on the ship!

As for the speed of the video, the frame rate is 60 frames/second, which worked well for the time limit.

Thank you for taking the time to share that with us Delgado!  We'll look forward to what you produce next.