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dylan604 | on: Insects don't swarm at LED lights
I love to shoot long exposure timelapse of the night sky. I set up a couple of LEDs dimmed as low as possible to light a bit of the foreground (over the course of the long exposure the low light adds up so it looks normal for those not familiar). Out of sheer laziness, I just placed them on either side of my tripod. The next day after processing the shot, it was pretty much ruined because of all of the bugs showing up as tracers in each frame.

So, no, not my experience at all.

hinkley | parent | next
Bugs don’t just materialize out of the ether to swarm lights. Not to feed swallows. They are there and you will encounter them if the density is much more than zero.

There are bugs. You photographed bugs. Maybe more than you would have without lights at all, maybe about the same.

Also better lights don’t necessarily mean perfect lights. We do lots of things to reduce harm. Unfortunately sometimes we do them too much and conserve a significant fraction of the original harm by increasing demand.

andai | root | parent
>Not to feed swallows.

I often visit a place full of swallows and mosquitoes. The swallows eat mosquitoes, and the mosquitoes eat me. So when I get bit, I joke I'm feeding the birds.

d3Xt3r | root | parent | next
Is that African or European swallows?
hinkley | root | parent
The circle of life!
edoceo | parent
Can we see that? Bet it looks cool.
dylan604 | root | parent
I was afraid I'd get a "pics or didn't happen" request! Even though that's not that's why you're asking. I don't know that I have the footage any more. I wasn't happy with it, and that was many many moons ago. It's not something I would have spent a lot of effort making copies of.
Joel_Mckay | root | parent
Could have keyed your external camera flash to a relay driver for the lights. Blinking them on for 1 second every 5 minutes shouldn't get gross moth dust on everything.

Also different insects are blind to various areas of the spectrum LED lights cover. So you just get different creatures showing up.

An incandescent filament bulb will probably give you warmer color in the deeper reds. Too high of a color temperature at night makes things look odd, and you may not immediately notice the HDR capture is skewed.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000I17G4O

The neutral "Bright White" Philips A19 Ultra Definition Frosted Dimmable LED Bulbs are about as good as you can get with cheap retail consumer E26 bulbs. Still, the weaker reds may to be an issue depending on what you are capturing, and one may have to drop to a lower color-temperature indoor version like "Soft White". =3

dylan604 | root | parent
I've experimented with this, but for single images exposing a person at shutter open, and then letting the person leave frame while continuing to expose the sky.

Having a strobe every exposure during a timelapse is annoying though. You'd get run out on a rail at a star party with nonsense like that. Sometimes, it really helps to think about others when doing your own thing and not being an asshat just because you want to do something

Joel_Mckay | root | parent
Could also try filtered low-pressure sodium lamps, as notch filtering out the light pollution is pretty trivial.

Maybe converting the yellow area of the image into grey scale would give you the highlights, and the color loss could look intentional in moonlight.

There are plenty of intervalometer options around, and even a few Arduino projects for the creative.

Best of luck, =3