Good evening everyone! I've been dying to test out the astrophotography timelapse feature of
the Google Pixel 4a since Google has announced it. But for the last few weeks it's been cloudy nights
after cloudy nights and finally tonight there's a night without too many clouds.
So I'm just gonna wait another half an hour to see if it's a good night or not but if it
is we're gonna go out in the middle of the lake and take some pictures and test this feature out.
For those of you who are new to this channel I'm Loïc Bellemare-Alford a young photographer
and filmmaker on a journey speaking better at this art. IIt's currently 10:30 p.m and I just
went inside to get my gear because I think it's gonna be the right night to test out this feature.
So now let's go out on the lake and really test it out. I'm super excited about this one!
Okay so I started stressing quite a lot while getting here because I could clearly see some
clouds coming in so I rushed over with my kayak, jumped outside, took my tripod, took my Google Pixel 4a
and started taking pictures right away! So I already saw the results and they're
pretty cool! So now let's set everything up so you can see how to take these pictures too.
Okay so now the camera is on the tripod we're ready to go and test this out. So if you haven't
changed already, go on Night Sight. The next thing you want to go inside of the settings
and just check a few things. So first of all we're going to go here and make sure that we
have astrophotography on "Auto" you don't want to have it off so just make sure it's on "Auto". Then
you can go in your settings here, and then go in "Advanced" and you want to make sure that "Enable time
lapse for astrophotography" is enabled. By default it is already enabled for you so it shouldn't be
a problem at all but just make sure it's actually okay before getting started. sSo now we're gonna go
back and we're ready to try and compose our shot. So I'm just gonna bring it up a little bit more to
get more sky inside of the photo. Then I might turn it a little bit more over here. Move it up again.
And now that we're ready we're simply going to wait for a second for the camera to realize that
astrophotography is on. So now astrophotography is on so now we're ready to click and to take
the shot. So now we're gonna wait for the full four minutes to get the final results.
If you want to learn more on how to take pictures of the stars using your phone,
I have another video that completely talks about that and I also have a few other videos
on how to take time lapses using your phone of the stars. So definitely go check those out
if you want to learn more advanced techniques but this one is all automated.
So we're going to see the results in four minutes. So now we just have to wait.
Okay so 15 seconds left. 10 seconds left so we're gonna see the results really really soon.
So three, two, one, it's done! So now we come in our shot right here. It's probably still processing
a little bit so we're just gonna wait a second for it to finish processing. sSo now we have our
photo just like we're used with the astrophotography mode on the google pixel phones.
But now if we look right here, we're gonna have a video and if we click on play right here
we have our little timelapse. So it's only one second which was a little bit
disappointing. I was expecting something a little bit longer but it's because it only takes the
pictures that it was taking while it was taking the astrophotography shot to create this timelapse. So
I would like if Google let us take something longer and get a longer timelapse.
But it's definitely a nice little thing to have when you're taking an astrophotography shot.
Okay so now let's try and take a few other shots because we're in the middle of Milky Way season
so there's probably a pretty good shot to get. So now let's set it up!
Okay so based on PhotoPills, the Milky Way should be right behind here. So I have my cell phone set
up right here. So now we're ready to take this shot and see if we can see it or not. Okay so we
just got our first preview right here after 15 seconds and it looks like we can see quite well
the Milky Way. So I'm really excited to see how it's gonna look like in the final result with
the little timelapse. Okay so five seconds left. It just completed. So now let's go and
see the result right here. So we have the picture that is processing right now and now if you look
at the little timelapse right here. Okay so this is pretty cool. So now we have the milky
way that is moving around and you can really see it really well in this picture. So this is
really cool having a little timelapse of the Milky Way using only your Google Pixel 4a.
Okay so before going back home, I wanted to quickly talk about my final thoughts of this timelapse
feature for the Google Pixel 4a. So the first thing is that it only works with the most recent Google
Pixel phone sso it's a Google Pixel 4 and above. So that's a little bit disadvantage if you do
have an older model and it doesn't support it. The second thing that is a bit annoying is that you're
really limited to the one second output which I think is just not quite long enough. It would be
nice to have something a little bit longer but the effect overall is pretty cool. And one thing
I discovered is that it works much better if you have a foreground. So I tried taking only the stars
and when I did that, the result just wasn't as good because you don't really have a reference of
something that's not moving inside of the frame to really show you the stars are moving a lot
more. So definitely try getting a foreground when taking these shots to get a better effect overall.
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