Time Lapse Photography (Part 1)

I've been reading a lot recently about time lapse photography, so I finally got around to getting myself a timed remote release.  I'll discuss this in two parts - part one (this part) will be about the remote release itself, setting up, ideas and things I've thought of about time-lapse, and the next part will be about the results.

So, I own Canon equipment - I mainly shoot with my 5D mk 2, but also have a 40D and 400D as well.  The Canon own brand timed release is the TC-80N3 which, wonderful as it may be, costs a whopping £112.67 from Amazon at the time of writing!  First, I need to explain that I'm happy to pay money for things that are worth it - Canon lenses are generally better than cheaper third party lenses, especially when you get to L series lenses; third party battery grips etc are often not as robust and not built to quite the same tolerances so they don't feel as good etc.  But, this timed release is basically a switch.  I have a degree in Electronic Engineering, and I know exactly what's inside one of these things!  I really cannot justify spending over £100 on this thing!

So, off I went to the font of all dodgy imported third-party things - Ebay.  I opted for a Chinese remote release, but as I'm impatient I bought it for £30 from someone selling it in the UK (if I'd decided to wait, it would have been £20 or so from Hong Kong).  I'm not in any way affiliated with the person selling it, but I clicked the Buy button on Friday morning and it was delivered on Saturday and I'm very pleased with it so I'm going to plug them - the name was pixlamb, the product was described as "UK Timer Remote Shutter Canon EOS 50D 5D 40Ds TC-80N3" and it was £31.99 at the time of writing.  There we go!  Note that if you're a Nikon-ist, then there are options for you too.


Anyway, back to what I'm supposed to the product.  Here's a few pictures:

This is the box that it came in:

 

Here's a few pictures of the device itself:

 

The plug to the camera - interesting, as it's the first remote release I own which has a locking connector:

And the instruction manual - crude English, but understandable.

The thing itself is actually pretty easy to use.  There are 5 "modes" - Delay, Long, Interval, Audio and Number.  

• Delay is used to set the initial delay before the first photo is taken.  This, presumably, is used to replace a standard timer on a camera.  Not much use for this one, to be honest.

• Long sets the length of time the shutter button is pressed.  In bulb mode, this specifies the shutter time.

• Interval is the time between shots.

• Audio switched the (irritating?) beep on and off.  It's off now, and I'm planning for it to stay that way!

• Number is the number of shots that will be taken in the sequence.

The modes are chosen by clicking left or right on the "joypad", and the values are adjusted by clicking up and down.  The LCD display is easy to understand, and it seems easy to set this up.  There's also a shutter button in the middle which handles half-press and full-press, and has a sliding lock tab which keeps it held down (and in the default mode the timer starts counting so you can see how long your exposure is).


Using the timer
I'm currently using the timer to take 96 shots of the night sky - this is in progress as I'm writing, so I've no idea how it's all going to turn out!  I've got a lot to learn about this, but so far I've figured out a couple of things:

• Obviously, you've got to manual focus etc as you would for any long night shots.  White balance worried me a bit, as I've currently got it set on Auto.  I'm guessing for night time this isn't going to be too much of problem, but I would thing that there are situations where you want to pick a specific white balance and leave it there.  However, if the sun rises or something significant changes, the WB will change drastically in the shot... Got to figure this one out! 

• The shot I'm doing at the moment is of the night sky, but the moon is out.  My first instinct was "great - I'll get the moon going across the sky".  That lasted about half a second - wrong!  The moon requires an exposure of about 1/100th second at a sensible aperture and 100 ISO.  To get some detail in the sky, I'm currently doing 25 second exposures at 1600 ISO!  The moon is definitely casting a massive amount of light into the images from the test shots that I did in setting up, but I'm trying to keep it out of the shots.

Right about now my time lapse exposure set should have finished, so I'm going to go and grab my camera from outside and try and find a way of patching this lot together.  My thinking was at 24fps I'd get 4 seconds - while not amazing, this will at least help me to understand things about time-lapse.  I will report my findings shortly...

Here's the second part, with some videos and comments so far: Timelapse Part 2