TimeTraveler

The Nikon D700 Rocks!

I had a great moment this week. Early on Friday morning (about 5:30 to be precise) I headed up to the top of Twin Peaks to catch what turned out to be an amazing sunrise. I had with me my brand new Nikon D700 ready for it's maiden time-lapse voyage. Mounted on this gorgeous camera was my new 14-24 2.8. Mother nature did her thing and the camera and lens were amazing. Here are some of the reasons I am so excited about the Nikon D700 for HDR time-lapse work.

Full frame: When you put this 14mm lens on the camera you get the full width. No more multiplying by 1.5. So with this camera it is a true ultra wide 14mm as opposed to my Nikon D200 where you are really at 21mm.

Fast continuos shutter: You can take 5 frames per or 8 fps with the add-on multi-power battery pack. For HDR this is key because you need to take around 7 photos as fast as possible to ensure there is no movement between frames. The D700 has a large buffer to which ensures uninterrupted capture

Self cleaning sensor: No more dust spots! This is a huge deal for me. I always seem to have dust on my sensor and when you are shooting the sun the aperture closes up and the dust is very visible even though you wouldn't see it with the aperture wide open.

Low light friendly: The D700 handles low light unlike anything I have ever seen. You can shoot at ISOs of 3200 and have no fear of noise. It is simply amazing. This really helps speed things up because when you are bracketing in low light your last 2 shots that are overexposing the sceen can be very problematic if the shutter needs to stay open for too long.

Here is my first piece with the D700 and ultrawide 14-24mm 2.8 lens.

For those of you familiar with weather patterns in SF you know I got luck with having some nice clouds and low hanging fog with out being completely fogged in which can often times happen on Twin Peaks. The last time I tried to do a shoot up there a few weeks ago here is what I got. The crazy orange color of the sun was from all of haze we had from the massive fires that we were having.

Panning + HDR + Time-lapse

I am starting to pull together panning, HDR and time-lapse into one somewhat chaordic capture and workflow system. As you would imagine there are a gazillion places things can go wrong and I am definitely finding areas where you are in unchartered territory and things definitely do not "just work" together. Ahhh but that is what makes it fun. Here is a picture of the set up.

The rotary table is on the top of my tripod. It is controlled by the Mumford Time Machine and Motion Controller that you can see on the ground.

Here is an example where things mostly came together. There are plenty of ways to improve it but there is a certain harmony of all the processes that starts to sing together at a somewhat acceptable level.... It is from Cannon Beach in Oregon.

Here is another example from Bandon Beach in Oregon which is further south down the coast, about 70 miles from the California border....

Here is a fun experiment doing a full 360 degree pan.