Star lapse

Riaan

New member
Hi all. I need some advice re my D5300. I tried to do an experimental star lapse last night. Settings - ISO3200, shutter 30secs, f-stop 3.5, Image quality - Basic, Image size - Small, 100 exposures, 1 sec interval. I specifically set all my settings to as low as possible as it was only an experiment using a new time lapse program. For some strange reason the camera only took 4 shots and then shut down. Battery was full. Then I set it to 15sec exposures and it took 30 shots on interval record and shut down. I've switched off most settings in the menu that could influence the rendering time to card. The card is used is a Sandisk 32Gb HC1 Micro SD, which should be fast enough. Afterwards I set the camera to 1sec exposures with 1 sec interval and it fired all 100 shots without a problem. Could anyone give me an idea what they think the problem is? I have a suspicion it might have something to do with the card or card adaptor. I'll do more tests today.

I have used this camera for star lapses (on high quality settings) without any problems before. Would love to know what you experts out there have to say.

Cheers!!
 
I have not done this before but you might try setting the interval to 31 seconds for the 30 second exposure. I would also set it to fine instead of basic. You quality will really suffer on basic.

Also one question....Why are you using a micro SD card with adapter instead of the SD card it requires?
 

Skwaz

Senior Member
As Don said if using 30 sec exposure with a timer the interval needs to be 31-32 seconds to give time for writing the image to the card
 

nickt

Senior Member
I've not done this, but you might need longer than 31 seconds. If your long exposure noise reduction is turned on, long exposure processing time will double. I'd just turn noise reduction off for testing. The basic idea is the interval needs to cover the time from shutter open to the finish of writing to the card, not just the time between shots. Noise reduction on a long exposure takes another image with the shutter closed at the same shutter time and then maps out the noise so a 30 second exposure could take over a minute to finish with noise reduction turned on. This noise reduction delay happens on exposures slower than 1 second when its turned on.
 
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