London is one of the most photographed and filmed cities in the world, but photographer and filmmaker Luke Miller has managed to capture it in a truly unique way.
His beautiful short film titled 'Sun Moon London' captures the city as it's illuminated by the sun and the moon. The difference here though is he's shot it with a lens equivalent to 2520mm.
Discovering a feature in the Magic Lantern firmware for his Canon EOS 5D Mark III DSLR that provided him with a 3x crop with no loss of quality, he partnered it with his Sigma 150-600mm f/5-6.3 super telephoto lens.
This gave him a focal length equivalent to 1800mm at the long end of the zoom, and by adding a 1.4x teleconverter, hit a staggering 2520mm. The resulting focal length meant that foregrounds and backgrounds were incredibly compressed.
Not just a point and shoot moment
It wasn't as straightforward as pointing his lens at something and hitting record, coming up against some issues shooting with such a mega focal length.
Speaking to PetaPixel, Luke revealed that his "biggest problem filming was the unpredictable UK weather.
"Total cloud cover being an obvious issue and wind that made shooting at super telephoto distances sometimes completely impossible, with the slightest breeze causing vibration and major rolling shutter issues that no amount of stabilizing in post could correct.”
To overcome this, Luke found that by using his tripod at its minimum height while securing the front of his lens to one of the tripod legs would provide enough stability to capture the shots he wanted.
The film features various landmarks across London, including The Shard, London Eye and Canary Wharf, as well as featuring the Harvest moon on October 5th 2017 and the Supermoon on January 1st 2018.
To see more of Luke's amazing work, check out his Instagram and Vimeo pages.
