D300: Interval Shooting

I had band rehearsal last night and, just for fun, I put the D300 up on the tripod and set it to take a shot every minute. I was able to put the ‘Interval shooing’ option into my ‘Custom’ menu so it was easy enough for me to get to but it’s not all that intuitive to setup. Once I completed the options they made sense but at first glance I was somewhat confused as to what I was changing. They feature set offered for interval shooting is pretty good though. You call have it start shooing at an interval right away, or at a specified time which makes is versatile both for fun time lapse shoots as well as for some kind of surveillance shooting. For me I set up the camera about an hour before rehearsal while I was getting ready and set it to start shooting as rehersal began. I suppose the draw back there is that camera makes a bit of noise when the mirror lifts up and drops back down.

Once you set the time to start the interval you can then set the number of shots to take per interval as well as how often to shoot and how many intervals to shoot for. The limiting factor here is really going to be your memory card though the camera won’t let you set up more then 999 intervals. Interesting though that you can do, say, 10 shots every minute for 600 minutes, or 100 shots every hour for 999 hours. Something that I did like though was that I was able to setup the interval shooting and then still take pictures by pressing the shutter release without disabling the interval. Made it simple to setup the interval and then mount it on the tripod and take test shots to work out the framing before setting it on it’s way. Power cycling the device will however disable the interval. Your settings will be saved but it will not shoot at the interval until you go back into the menu’s and set it to enable. A good choice so far as I can tell.

During rehearsal it took everyone about 20 minutes to realize the camera was there, I had been hoping it would be quiet enough to go unnoticed but alas, it’s quite noisy. I’ve yet to really look at the images but using the screen on the camera I was able to cycle though and see them. It changed the shutter speed and aperture for each shot and refocused so I was pretty pleased with what I saw quickly. A very useful function of the D300 that I had been looking forward too. The only challenge now would be to get the camera to shoot in intervals while leaving the mirror in the up position to quiet it down a bit. I don’t want to be secretive but if I setup the camera to shoot I don’t want it drawing attention to itself…

Topslakr