A Darwin Tide

With a full moon in early January, Darwin experienced some of the largest tidal exchanges of our time here – not as big as in early December, but up there. This provided an excellent opportunity to capture a time-lapse video.

Friday 13 January was a great time to capture a time-lapse, which I commenced shortly after the load tide of 0.57m at 12:52pm, and ran until just after the peak high of 7.86m at 7:27pm, a tidal exchange of some 7.29m! With the sun having set at 7:19pm, the end of the timelapse corresponded nicely with blue hour, a great time to shoot.

A good place to really notice the change is with the barge pictured in the lower right – it starts off resting on mud, but by the end is moving around in the water as you’d expect from a vessel tied off to a wharf and in no way touching the bottom.

The massive tidal change is one of the key features of Darwin Harbour, and a great way to tell this story is with the use of time-lapse photography.

I captured one image every 10 seconds over the period on my Panasonic Lumix GX7, using a MIOPS Smart Trigger to control the intervals. I then compiled the images on my laptop using ON1 Photo RAW to pre-process the images, then the Time-Lapse app for macOS to compile the time lapse sequence, before completing the movie in iMovie.

For this shoot I also used Willy Weather to get Darwin Tide and Sunset information. Willy Weather is an app and website I use regularly in planning photographic outings.