Last Thursday I went up to Rocky Mountain National Park after work. My intention was to shoot some video of the sun setting. I got up there a bit late and didn’t have enough time to scout out a good location.
I set up my camcorder, composed the shot and hit the record button. I then wandered around a little bit with my still camera to pass the time. About five minutes later I went back to the camcorder and the battery had died.
Still Camera
I set my still camera up on the tripod, set it to aperture priority with F/11 and took a shot. After about three photos I realized that the shutter speed was adjusting for the change in light, as a result, the shot looked exactly the same. I wanted the photos to get progressively darker not adjust, so I set the settings to Manual and continued taking photos.
Every Two Minutes
My camera will only take so many photos in a row so every two minutes I snapped a photo. In the first few shots I noticed that I was bumping the tripod when I hit the shutter button. I got out my shutter release cable and for the remainder of the shots I triggered the camera wirelessly. In the end 33 shots were taken and compiled into Premiere and speed up to 3000%.
As the days become longer I will have a chance to get up to Rocky Mountain National Park more often and get the shot that I want. I like this method, but it was kind of a pain. I know that Canon’s EOS software allows for a computer to tell the camera to take a picture every so often. I think this would be a good solution so I wouldn’t have to hit the shutter button over and over.
This article was published on Wednesday, April 14th, 2010 at 10:30 am. View other posts in the Projects category.
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