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.

New camera for Susan...

Camera buying hats on please. Susan's six year old Olly has done her spectacularly well, however she's starting to get frustrated with it and run into the particular problem of xD cards no longer being for sale.

(frankly I don't blame her for wanting to change, the LCD screen on the back in hilariously small!)

However, her requested specs look like she's going to struggle to find something:

Wants viewfinder
Would like articulated LCD screen, like on David's Nikon
Doesn't want anything bigger or heavier than the current camera
Lens to be about the same as the Olly - x10 optical
I imagine budget is not going to be above £200-£300, if that

Any ideas?

I'm hoping she might compromise on the viewfinder/articulated screen - which widens the choice massively.

Cheers - Tom

Edit: This is what she has now, I think.

Edit: Susan has said she'd be prepared to compromise on the size/weight if it meant she gets the eye-level viewfinder and vari-angle screen...although I don't think she's quite realised that could mean a camera the size of David's Nikon!

If anyone wants to buy my negatives, I'm sure we can come to a deal....;)

Ansel negs bought for $45 could be worth $200m

Sometimes I wonder...

..why I bother with the cost and hassle of the DSLR.




(One image taken with the Nikon D300, plus Sigma zoom. The other with my Fuji F70 point-and-shoot. Both at "300mm" (although not strictly comparable due to sensor sizes). I'll leave you to work out which is which.)

Actually, I do know why I bother. The F70 image has had to be cropped heavily and then resampled, while the D300 image hasn't (although there is some cheating...it's actually a stacked composite of two images to get the wings and body in focus, while keeping the shallow depth of field for the background).

No control over depth of field on the compact - colour rendition also pretty hit and miss.

This was in bright, afternoon sun which allowed shooting at 200 ISO - anything above 400 ISO starts to lose masses of detail with the NR smearing on the F70.

Slooooow. Fuji one of fastest compacts I've used, but still enough shutter lag and blackout to mean anything moving is a hit and miss affair.

Macro madness

Didn't want to overload Facebook with photo-nerdery - but here are a couple more in the "Tom stands in the garden with his zoom out" series.

As I said, used the Sigma 70-300@300 and in macro mode.

I've got a bank of settings designed for "sport" which is set up to use a limited auto-ISO mode (200-800), upping the ISO to keep the shutter speed above 1/200s.

Initially I tried using the autofocus, but the Sigma is just too slow and with a busy background and small subject, was ending up locking onto background objects too often. Had more success switching to manual focus - or towards the end, manually getting the focus plane pretty close to where it needed to be, then flicking to auto (continuous) to let it make the last adjustment and continue to adjust if I fired off multiple shots.

Looking back at the shots, both full manual and manual/auto focus approaches had about as many hits as misses.

As you'll see from the bigger sizes, even the "hits" are pretty soft, which shows up a) the lens and b) the difficulty with trying to get things in motion with a razor thin plane of focus! Light levels let me go up to f8, but even this, as you'll see, doesn't give any depth of field at all.

I've also had to crop in the finish photos from the wider shots (the 300 macro doesn't get that close), which hasn't helped quality.

General learning from the process:

Hoverflies are good - they tend to hang around the same bushes for several minutes at a time, there are lots of them and they stop and hover - as the name suggests!

Patience - like most photography it's more about the willingness to stand around and take 200 photos, then any particular talent!

Use both eyes - because the Sigmas macro mode locks you into 200-300mm, was having to find where flies were with eye away from the finder, then try to locate them in the finder while zoomed, which proved difficult at first, but with a bit of practice and keeping both eyes open you begin to get the knack of "seeing" the wide scene with one eye, the zoomed image with the other and somehow navigating your way round both to get the insect into the middle of the frame!

Insect backsides are fairly boring - and they're not very helpful and keep moving around, so I had to rotate around them quite a lot to get the more interesting views. Hoverflies again nice subjects as they didn't seem that bothered with me standing very close.

A bit quiet around here....

Have we all given up?

Here's a picture of a pine cone on a wall. Took it for some homework of Imogen's but decided I quite liked it. 

Not likely to happen to me...

See this article. I know it's in the Daily Mail (and I feel dirty for linking to it) but the other news reports didn't have the photos.