First Time Lapse

Continuing with my mission to make good use of my new carbon fibre tripod¹ I headed out this evening to a nearby high point with a good view west down the Moray Firth towards Nairn town centre.

This time I was using one my favourite lenses, my Tokina 24mm f/2.8, on the front on my NEX-6. I pointed it into the setting sun and had it stopped down to f/11, set the shutter speed to 1/300s and ISO 100. Then with the aid of a time lapse app on my phone I paired it with the camera over WiFi and set it off for the next half hour or so taking a photo every ten seconds.

This is the result, processed using ffmpeg at 12fps.

Not bad but I made two mistakes:

1. I had the camera in manual exposure mode to stop it "hunting" and I set the exposure at the start based on the suggested speed in aperture priority plus a bit. So it started off over exposed by +1 stop. By the end of the run we were just heading towards -3 stops so in retrospect I needed to go higher and go for +2 stops so I will end up at -2 stops at the end of the run.
2. I'd set the time lapse app to take one photo every five seconds. It took me far too long to realise that the camera was taking one every ten. The reason for this was that when taking aurora photos I'd turned the "review photo" option on (I usually have it off) and had set it so long that after five seconds it was still in review mode so it missed the next trigger. Hence it was only triggering every ten seconds. So in future I need to make sure "review photo" is turned off.

Anyway, it wasn't a bad start all the same and I'll do better next time ... and hopefully catch a better sunset too.

1. This is one of my photo projects for the year, the other being to take aurora photos.