Btw, I dunno who or what your boss thinks. But 300 bucks for timelapsing a one and a half year project is ridicious. I think you are great to put in the effort of making the best out of it, I like that in people.

That's what I thought.

That's what we all thought.

The boss wanted a Rebel T3 with wide angle lens, intervalometer, and weatherproof, heated, cooled, solar-powered outdoor enclosure. He proposed it to the administration asking for about $1500 (on a $14M building!) and they shot him down. So we funded it out of our own budget, which, at the end of the fiscal year, is stretched thin already.

Believe me we're not pleased with the set-up, but we're doing the best we can with what we have to work with. At the same time, there are almost no expectations of quality out of this project from anyone, so nobody will be let down, really.

And, the white balance is set to auto on the camera.

(and you're right, anytime I want to adjust the interval or something like that, I need to go touch the camera. Sucky all the way around, I know. Theoretically, though, once everything is dialed in, I won't have to touch it for long, long periods of time. the Wifi enabled SD card is set to auto-clear all transferred photos as soon as it reaches 80% capacity, so it will create "endless memory" as it were...won't have to really mess with it at all unless the script crashes or it falls out of the window or something.

I wish you good luck coming months. If it goes bad, it wasn't because you didn't put in enough effort!

Keep us posted!

And, the white balance is set to auto on the camera.

I would recommend setting it to a fixed default, I usually use "cloudy" for a warm nice cast. Auto WB can cause sudden changes in temperature that are quite impossible to correct afterwards.

quite impossible to correct afterwards.

You're not kidding, one of the reasons I hate shooting jpeg.

I'm not sure if I'd rather it be right most of the time and flicker a little now and then with sudden changes (auto), or have it too warm/cool constantly. Will have to think about that. Since the lighting in the various scenes changes a lot, any fixed value will be wrong fairly regularly. Or maybe I can find some kind of middle ground, etc.

I think I may test this week on auto, which should give me a decent sample and see what I think of the output, and go from there.

In my opinion it's vice versa: Auto-WB is wrong almost most of the time because it corrects to a neutral WB. In "warm" morning or evening light Auto-WB makes images too cold. Every passing cloud changes the WB. When i shoot JPG I almost everytime set the WB to a constant, rather "warm" setting.

In my opinion it's vice versa: Auto-WB is wrong almost most of the time because it corrects to a neutral WB. In "warm" morning or evening light Auto-WB makes images too cold. Every passing cloud changes the WB. When i shoot JPG I almost everytime set the WB to a constant, rather "warm" setting.

Now that I think about it, you're right. That makes a lot of sense.

Gwegner is right in 'normal timelapses'

In longterm and less frequent shooting timelapses, a fixes WB on cloudy days can cause a lot of trouble. I corrected the fixed later on, with autowhitebalance in Lightroom, and the result was amazing. It stayed on a very normal colour througout the days, wheres as the fixes turned to all colors cause of the huge differences in whitebalance during morning, midday and afternoon, not to mention strange cloudy days.

I am now testing the AWB setting on the camera's, cause in postprocessing on jpg's you do loose some information in whitebalancecorrecting. But my opinion now is, go for the AWB. The camera is smarter then you think

This post was last modified: 2012-06-06, 23:16 by matt314159.

Gwegner is right in 'normal timelapses'

In longterm and less frequent shooting timelapses, a fixes WB on cloudy days can cause a lot of trouble. I corrected the fixed later on, with autowhitebalance in Lightroom, and the result was amazing. It stayed on a very normal colour througout the days, wheres as the fixes turned to all colors cause of the huge differences in whitebalance during morning, midday and afternoon, not to mention strange cloudy days.

I am now testing the AWB setting on the camera's, cause in postprocessing on jpg's you do loose some information in whitebalancecorrecting. But my opinion now is, go for the AWB. The camera is smarter then you think

Arghh, what are you folks doing to me, LOL!

Our days are almost always at least partly cloudy during some point, so I could see that being a problem.

I guess what's good: Since this IS such a long project, I can test it with AWB for a week, and if I notice I don't like the way it's coming out, change it for the rest of the project. Since I do incremental builds, I will be able to track how it's coming and tweak as necessary.

Speaking more to exposure, if I were being picky, I would wish there were a way to not blow out the sky so much, but I think part of it is the reduced dynamic range of JPG (data is dropped, can't pull back on the whites like you can in raw), partly because of the reduced dynamic range of the smaller sensor of the p&s vs a DSLR, and partly is just the impossibility of it without using a GND filter (which I can't really do with the point and shoot). I don't really think there's a good solution to that problem, but if there's anything you know of I'm all ears. (besides "get a DSLR and use a GND filter") ;-)

Here's an example:

http://imgur.com/Zvvj0

Actually, a blown out sky is not so bad. Maybe on the day to day picture it is. But remember what happens when the clouds come over and you go to 10 every minute, that means half a day is one second.

You gonna want to blow out, or soften the sky then anyway, cause it looks like heaven is passing by on a fast strobe train.

So, blown out sky solves that problem that you will never solve. To much change between shots. And the sky will do that to you!

So, blown out sky solves that problem that you will never solve. To much change between shots. And the sky will do that to you!

Haha thanks for the perspective! I've got to admit I love our iowa skies, I had this image in my head of our incremental time lapses being the construction, with the glorious clouds floating smoothly across in the background! But the goal is to see, clearly, the construction progress, and I think that's been met.