August 16, 2011 Summer Time Lapse - How To

Over the weekend I decided to try my skills again at time lapse photography. The style that requires patience, a little luck, and time. The one I did is nothing spectacular, standard clouds rolling by. My intention was to get the whole day and transition into the evening, get a nice moon rise with the stars and airplanes. I goofed up the camera settings after the sun went down and didn't restart it.

Here's how I did it. I used a Nikon D200, my Asus netbook, a USB cable, the Nikon DC power pack, and Nikon's Camera Control software. In order to get seamless shots you cannot use the camera alone by itself for long periods. The internal buffer is about 100 shots before it stops and writes, that's when you get gaps in the flow. The other problem is power. On battery you have about 2-3 hours of shots before you have to switch the battery out and any gap will show up. So a while back I got the Nikon DC wall power pack for these types of scenarios and star trail work.

I picked my spot in the house that would be away from nosy intruders and move things once I got everything setup and setup the tripod. Hooked up the camera to the netbook via USB and within the camera control software you can fully control all the options and settings on the camera without having to touch or move it. The shots were set to Aperture Priority, F3.5, ISO 200. The software has specific time lapse settings so I used that to take shots every 7 seconds and let it fly. The clock time in the video covers about 1pm to 9pm.

Where I goofed was the aperture priority pushed the exposures to over 15 seconds by the time the moon rose and my interval was less than the exposure time which was causing me to miss intervals. By the time I figured it out a few minutes passed and I stopped it. Overall not bad, but I can do better.

Here are my first time lapse videos I experimented with from a while ago.

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Posted in: Photography