Timelapse shutter speed rule of thumb explained

The widely accepted rule of thumb for shooting timelapses is that your shutter speed should be 1/2 your interval. What this means is if you are shooting one shot every 3 seconds, then your ideal exposure is 1.5 seconds. WHY? The point of shooting timelapses is to end up with video at some point, right? …

Canon 7D firmware 2.0 and 2.0.3 released

Canon released firmware v2.0.3 for the 7D recently. Go here to find it. It fixes some things broken by the 2.0 update. The 2.0 firmware enables a bunch of new features. Here is the canon site explaining everything. My favorite options are the higher burst rate, higher max iso, and the manual audio levels. Oh, …

Weird banding on Canon 7d explained!

The other night I was out filming traffic. I ended up getting a really weird camera artifact. It looks like a dark bar that rolls through the shot from bottom to top. At first it made me freak out a bit, thinking that the camera was somehow broken. I eventually figured out that it is …

Slow motion from the 7d. 720p60 to 24p How-to

There were a few different stages of excitement that I went through after getting my Canon 7d. First I played around with all of my manual nikon lenses (using an adapter of course). Next I marveled at the settings and the live view feature. Finally I decided I wanted to go out and shoot some …

Cheapest follow focus ever for canon 7d / 5d mark II

Ever since I have fallen in love with the Canon 7d dslr, I have been fantasizing about making a legit follow focus for a dslr. It allows you to have more control over the focusing, and a smoother camera because your rotation is in a different axis as the lens. (You may hear more of …

$17 Arduino-based nikon IR intervalometer + code

This is a project that allows me to take pictures at any (reasonable) interval. This allows the photographer to create time lapse movies with a digital slr. This is an arduino-based project that should work for any nikon camera with an IR port. Best of all it only cost $17!

powering a nikon d40 from an ac outlet

I have been shooting a lot of time lapses lately. The biggest problem with that is battery life. I have a very ghetto hack to power the camera from a cell phone charger, but I am looking for a more permanent solution. I found a fotodiox battery grip on amazon that has an internal battery, …