Nikon 5100 - Intervalometer

Bailiejo · August 13, 2013

A number of us from the Photo club went to a secluded area to shoot the stars and meteorites last Saturday night. I only had a remote release without a locking feature. Since we needed to take at least 60 - 100 shots, it was necessary to either use the intervalometer or a hard wired remote. We were shooting at 30", wide angle or 18mm, ISO 1600, noise reduction was off, continuous shooting, manual focus but I couldn't get the intervalometer to take any more than 2 shots. I had it set for a 2 second interval and to take 100 photos. Does anyone know if there might be other settings that should be on or off to get the intervalometer to take the number of pics requested. This option can be found in the shooting menu, called Interval Time Shooting. One of the other girls has a Nikon, different model, and hers was working fine. We didn't have time to review all the settings to compare hers to mine. Another friend has a Pentax and she ended up with the same problem last night. Any help you can provide would be appreciated.

silvio000 · August 14, 2013

Hi Bailiejo,

Don't know if its the same problem but what happened to me was identical.

On my d7100 i set the intervalometer for 9x9 series of photos, making it 81 total shots. However, it stopped at 9.
When i changed to 81x1 it worked fine.

What did not worked fine was the light pollution. Only got 1 meteor and the final result was a mess. Man, i hate big cities.

Bailiejo · August 15, 2013

silvio000 wrote: »

Hi Bailiejo,

Don't know if its the same problem but what happened to me was identical.

On my d7100 i set the intervalometer for 9x9 series of photos, making it 81 total shots. However, it stopped at 9.
When i changed to 81x1 it worked fine.

What did not worked fine was the light pollution. Only got 1 meteor and the final result was a mess. Man, i hate big cities.

Thanks for the response. It's a shame to have this built in feature and not be able to use it. Fortunately, someone loaned me their hardwired remote so I was able to get my 100 pictures and stack them using StarStax to produce a wonderful shot of Star Trails.

Bailiejo · August 16, 2013

Perhaps this might help. I wrote directly to Nikon and this is what they said. It sort of makes sense that the counter starts when the shutter button is pressed.

First off your shutter speed is 30 second. Which mean if you kept it at 1 second as per your original question for 100 images, once the shutter or count start, as soon the shutter click it start counting 1 second. However, if your camera is not ready like you mention 30 second shutter speed, the counter still continue. This mean you will have a total of 15 images approximately in this time span not 100.

The reason we chose 35 second interval, this also take in the count of your 30 second exposure. By the time 30 second exposure finish, mean the camera will have 5 second to react to the next image. This 5 second put in extra to calculate the images being saved to the memory card before take the next image start.

Now if you shooting in RAW (NEF) files you might want to increase the interval slightly. The test was done base on JPEG, with 30 second exposure and on a tripod.

If you taking long exposure make sure your camera is set properly on a tripod and have an accurate focus (manual focus is recommend) this way the camera do not have any delay on re-focusing the same subject before taking an image.

Hope this will help you understand how the interval works.

Matthew Saville · August 16, 2013

Bailiejo wrote: »

Perhaps this might help. I wrote directly to Nikon and this is what they said. It sort of makes sense that the counter starts when the shutter button is pressed.

First off your shutter speed is 30 second. Which mean if you kept it at 1 second as per your original question for 100 images, once the shutter or count start, as soon the shutter click it start counting 1 second. However, if your camera is not ready like you mention 30 second shutter speed, the counter still continue. This mean you will have a total of 15 images approximately in this time span not 100.

The reason we chose 35 second interval, this also take in the count of your 30 second exposure. By the time 30 second exposure finish, mean the camera will have 5 second to react to the next image. This 5 second put in extra to calculate the images being saved to the memory card before take the next image start.

Now if you shooting in RAW (NEF) files you might want to increase the interval slightly. The test was done base on JPEG, with 30 second exposure and on a tripod.

If you taking long exposure make sure your camera is set properly on a tripod and have an accurate focus (manual focus is recommend) this way the camera do not have any delay on re-focusing the same subject before taking an image.

Hope this will help you understand how the interval works.

When shooting 30 sec exposures, I have found that 33 sec. is the perfect interval otherwise it will "skip a shot" as you were describing. At 35 sec intervals, you might start to miss stuff and/or get little blips in your final star trail if that is what you're going for.

Personally, if I can pull off 30 sec. shutter speeds then I don't bother with an intervalometer, I just jam my shutter down with a rubber band. You have to maybe tape a small pebble between the rubber band and the shutter button, but once you get it working it hums along just fine as long as your buffer can handle it.

The only reason I ever use intervalometers is for when I need to shoot during the day, of course, at faster shutter speeds that are far less than the interval, OR if I need to shoot 1-2 minute exposures which is often necessary for extra-dark locations such as the desert during a new moon.

You can see a lot of sample images created using various settings along these lines in my latest work: http://photos.matthewsaville.com

=Matt=

Nikon 5100 - Intervalometer

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