Another go at timelapse – I happened to be awake at dawn and noticed the clouds were looking rather pink and fluffy, so decided to set the camera up and see what I could do. I set the timer for 1500 exposures at the lowest detail setting at f/5.6 ISO 200 and a focal length of 28mm. The result was fairly good although there was a period of about 200 frames where there were very few clouds in frame and the camera was pointed almost directly at the sun – this inevitably resulted in some overexposure, but I don’t think it ruins the video. I followed the same process described in my previous posts to compile the JPEG images into an AVI and an FLV and you can see the results.
I am starting to get a little worried about the number of shutter actuations on my camera. When I bought it apparently it had something in the region of 1000 already on it – I never actually checked this before I started taking pictures but I’m assuming it was fairly accurate. The camera was in mint condition when I got it and looked like it’d barely been used, so I believe the guy who sold it to me when he said it only had 1000 on it. Since then I’ve managed to clock up over 15,000 shutter actuations! That’s pretty extreme for about 1 month!
For those who don’t know; a shutter actuation is one click of the shutter button – in other words, the shutter actuation count is a count of the number of photographs that have been taken on a camera. It’s a bit like the mileometer on a car – it’s a fairly good gague of general wear-and-tear. On Canon EOS cameras that use the DIGIC chipset version III and above you can read the shutter actuation count using this utility. Nikon cameras actually include the shutter actuation count in the EXIF data of each image captured. See my previous entry for a brief description of EXIF. All other brands are irrelevant.
Technology has a nasty habit of dying prematurely on me – I think it’s probably because I overuse it. I’m lucky to get a year out of a computer before it starts needing replacement parts. I’m just a little worried that the shutter in my camera is going to break – the shutter’s the most delicate part of the camera and Canon rate the 40D’s shutter for 100,000 actuations. That means at the rate I’m going the camera will be dead in just over 6 months! Not good! Except for the fact that it’s still within its warranty, so if the shutter does die within the 6 months, Canon will hopefully fix it for free.
Doing timelapse certainly clocks up quite a few shutter actuations – 1500 in the case of the video below. That seems high, but thinking about it; when I go out to do photography at Cuckmere Haven I’ll happily fill a 2Gb memory card twice over. Depending on the detail in the images, that can easily add up to 1200 exposures. Today, for example, I was at Cuckmere Haven for a little over 2 hours and I clocked up 500 images easily – and the weather conditions weren’t even that good and there wasn’t a lot to photograph!
Now I’m faced with a choice – either I carry on thrashing my camera at the rate I’m doing at the moment and hope that the shutter fails within the warranty period and is repaired for free; or I try and cut down on the number of exposures I take and try to prolong the life of the shutter for as long as possible. Whatever I do, the shutter is virtually guaranteed to fail at exactly the point at which the warranty expires. That’s what seems to happen with every other piece of technology that I buy. I’m pretty sure that most hardware manafacturers design their hardware to last exactly as long as the warranty. Understandable, but annoying!
Anyway, here’s the timelapse that I produced of the sun rising over Brighton:
