D800E Timelapse Questions

[gunslingor]

I just bought the D800E. I've read that you cannot use auto focus with timelapse or interval because the camera often takes too long to focus and skips the shot. What about aperture, ISO and shutter speed, can I set those to auto? The reason is that I kind want to take a 24 hour over 1 minute movie of the day and night skies in Denali Park and potentially off the cruise balcony I'll be on.

I've also read the built in timelapse is a little dinky, that you can get many orders of magnitude better quality if you use the interval timer, custom settings and software. All agree with this right?

What other recommendations can you guys make regarding shooting off a cruise and across day/night?

I've never messed with timelapse before and until recently I was using film cameras... but I'm a computer engineer so I can figure it out easily.

 

[WayneF]

I've also read the built in timelapse is a little dinky, that you can get many orders of magnitude better quality if you use the interval timer, custom settings and software. All agree with this right?

Actually, I disagree with about all of that, but that line most of all. The Interval timer seems excellent.

Timelapse is for movies, and I don't even know if the Interval Timer option works in live view. Probably does, but I never even thought to try that, and have no desire to try it now. Live View (and movies) have much less versatile controls than the viewfinder, esp low end camera models leave out more. For example, some models cannot adjust aperture at all after movie recording starts. This varies with model, and I make no bets on live view.

Certainly Interval Timer works very well in the viewfinder. Certainly auto exposure controls work fine. There is other overhead much greater, time to process the JPG, to buffer the file, to write the file to memory, etc. Auto focus is something else, not because of interval timer, but unattended focusing is always a bad plan, doesn't always work. We cannot even expect focus to easily find us when we stand in front of the camera. You surely want manual focus for unattended shots.

This is surely something you want to practice and see on your back porch, before arriving at Denali.

Here is one using D300 Interval Timer.



Every 30 seconds for 48 hours. Indoors with flash, but the two flashes are morning sun through an overhead window.

Actually, I did buy a cheap timer for my D800, but only because the control dial would not allow using both Mirror Up and Self Timer at same time. But the interval timer has no need of it.

About the only trouble reported about the interval timer is from those wanting to use 30 second exposures (star trails, etc). This is only because 30 seconds on any camera shutter actually means 32 seconds (the progression 1,2,4,8,16,32 seconds is necessary for even stops), so the 32 second shutter simply cannot fit in a 30 second interval. Not obviously apparent, probably some ridiculous wrong stories about that, but we need to specify 33 second intervals for the 32 second shutter.

 

[KmH]

What lens focal length are you planning to use?

 

[gunslingor]

Thanks for the info guys

What lens focal length are you planning to use?

I'll have the following:
Zeiss 21mm
sigma 35mm 1.4
sigma 50-500 AF

I imagine I'll use the 21 and 35 for time lapse.

Generally speaking though you do appear to have tons more flexibility with the interval on the D800 than you do with the timelapse; for example, any format, any length up to memory limits, etc... I bet you could even do HDR or bracketing... but more importantly I think you can shoot in RAW and get ultra high resolution timelapse... I could be wrong, I am a noob at this.