Time lapse nerdery

As usual, trying to constrain the detailed nerdery to here, rather than Facebook.

Was hoping to do a sequence like this under the dark and clear skies of Scotland, but ironically, got the best results out the back of my folks house in the suburban sprawl of the North East.

After a few false starts on previous nights, best results seemed to come from M, 30s, f8, ISO 800. Camera was on tripod, with focus preset to infinite and as wide as possible (I shot from inside, through french window, so was a little limited on framing).

I switched NR on this time, but would probably do without next time I try.

D300 interval shooting menu is an absolute masterpiece of confusing UI - however I eventually worked out how to set it to take one exposure every minute, leaving a 30s gap between.

Camera set to shoot jpg, at medium settings to allow around 700 images onto a 4GB card.

However all three times I tried this over the week, battery never lasted longer than 200-300 exposures. Everything done to optimise it, switched off image review, freshly charged battery etc. I'd probably try again without NR, which I suspect eats up some power, but figure people who achieve eight hour exposures use the AC adapters or some sort of jury rigged power unit based on car battery for remote use.

Earlier experiment with camera on tripod in car, shooting through windscreen, saw even fewer exposures - due to cold draining battery quickly.

Images were then dragged into iMovie untouched (I probably could have set up a PS action to process them all identically but for this initial test, didn't see the need), set to display for .1 sec, then exported as a medium sized MV4 file.