I’m just back from another trip to New York, and the hotel I stayed in had fantastic views both towards midtown and out over Brooklyn.

Here’s a link to a short timelapse that I shot on Thursday night. Last week was the first time I’ve tried to shoot in variable lighting conditions, i.e., with anything other than a fixed manual exposure, and the resulting movie does have the slight flickering that you would expect from an automatic exposure. I didn’t shoot on full auto though: I wanted to capture pictures at a set interval, so I set TV to 10 seconds, and then set my intervalometer to 11 seconds. I had a couple of bites at this, as there is a chance that the ever widening aperture of the lens isn’t going to be enough as the light continues to fade. So for this series of shots, the exposure starts at F16, and finishes at F3.5 – aka wide open for my 10-22mm lens. For my first attempt, I experimented with the TV setting, and started on F22, on a 20 second exposure, which finished a couple of hours later at F8. The fully stopped down starting point was pretty much guaranteeing that I would have aperture ‘headroom’ at the end of the series, but it meant a much longer overall shooting time.

I am conscious of the fact that this is eating into the life of my camera: I did a long timelapse the other day, and it took 1600 shots. For the 7d, which is rated for 150k actuations, that’s clearly a consideration.

Just as an aside, I just did some digging into how to find out the number of actuations. The only mechanism I could get to work was gphoto2, which I installed today as I might look into doing some remote control using it. For the record, I’ve apparently take 20,105 shots with my camera to date. As I bought my camera at the end of January last year, that equates to an average of 36.35 pictures a day.

Gulp!