timelapse not taking sequential photos [solved: 30s actually 32s]

[greenplasticdave]

Hello

While shooting a timelapse of stars for the purposes of making a startrail photo I ran into some issues getting unleashed to take the next photo in the sequence. I had previously done this with no issue) I set an exposure of 30 seconds and set the interval to (31 seconds this was the minimum it would allow before ungreying the start button) give it enough time to process, making sure the start button was not greyed out and there were no other warnings. Sometimes it would finish the photo and THEN wait 31 seconds before taking the next one. Ideally I want it to start the next photo as soon as the previous one is finished so there are no gaps in the startrails. Does the interval between photos begin counting at the beginning or the end of the photo? I don't know what happened but after updating firmware it seemed to work OK. Is there any reason this might have happened? Could it happen again?

Thank you

Dave

[Oliver]

Hi Dave,

This is an interesting one:
We found out as we were implementing our long exposure feature, that both Nikon and Canon cheated! While you set 15 or 30s exposures in the camera, they actually (and more correctly) keep the shutter open for 16 and 32s respectively. After all, one stop diffference means doubling the exposure, so it should go 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, etc. I believe the 15 and 30s are there only for historic reasons, or to better fit the time intervals we're used to from the rest of the world.

This means that you should set your interval to 33s to get a 1s pause between shots. You can try to use 32s, if the app will let you, but you might run into trouble with that a little later in your Interval shot, we did always depend on that 1 second pause in our Firmware.

I hope this helps!

[greenplasticdave]

Thanks, Oliver.

I'll give that a go next time and see what happens.

Regards

Dave