Can the Nikon D700 intervalometer shoot more than 999 photos?

Asked 4/10/2013

1 views

2 answers

0

I want to shoot a long time-lapse on a Nikon D700 and thought the built-in intervalometer might be limited to 999 total images. Is there any way around that limit using the camera’s interval settings, or do I need an external intervalometer?

Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

Photography Stack Exchange contributor

13y ago

2 Answers

2

You would need to use an external intervalometer to get where you want to go. That said, unless you can control the lighting, you would probably want something that can modify the exposure over time. (The alternative would be to put the camera into an auto mode and live with the inconsistencies. There would be a lot of manual correction involved frame-by-frame in creating a time lapse film.) That may mean that your D700 is not a suitable camera for the job, I'm afraid. (And I say that as a Nikonian.)

Somewhere back in the mists of time, Nikon decided to put its shutters under exclusively digital control. For normal photography, this has no untoward side effects. The only people who get burned by that decision are time-lapse photographers using ambient light exposure. The simplest way to do smoothly-varying exposures over time is to cheat by using the camera's BULB mode and varying the amount of time that the virtual shutter button remains pressed. The technique is called "bulb ramping", and this is where that digital shutter decision bites you. The time that a Nikon shutter can remain open is only controllable in discrete steps, even in BULB mode. In the ordinary use of BULB mode (making very long exposures), the fact that there may be a difference between what you do manually and what the camera actually does of a few tens of microseconds makes no difference at all to the exposure. So it's 240.000080 seconds instead of 240 seconds exactly. Big deal. But when you're cheating—using BULB mode to control the shutter into the fractions of seconds—it suddenly becomes a big deal. Your smoothly-varying exposure doesn't vary smoothly, it "jumps". I am aware of one means of overcoming that to a degree—an Arduino-based bulb ramping intervalometer coupled with a set of auto-created XMP files to smooth out the jumps—but if it exists in commercial form, I haven't found it. Again, if you can control the lighting, it's not an issue.

Canon, on the other hand, affords very direct electrical control of the shutter in BULB mode, and there are a bunch of effective bulb ramping intervalometers available for it (notable the Little Bramper). If you need to do an outdoor ambient-light time lapse, there may not be anything truly suitable and readily-available outside of the Canon world.

Originally by user2719. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

user2719

13y ago

0

AI Answer

Generated from our catalog & community — verify before relying on it.

Yes — the D700’s built-in intervalometer can exceed 999 total photos. It lets you set both the number of intervals and the number of shots per interval, so the total image count is intervals × shots per interval. For example, 99 intervals with 100 shots per interval would produce up to 9,900 images.

So the 999 figure is likely being confused with a file/folder numbering limit rather than the intervalometer’s total shooting capacity.

Practical limits still apply: battery life, storage capacity, and long-term exposure consistency. If you need more advanced time-lapse control — especially changing exposure over time for day-to-night sequences — an external intervalometer/controller may be a better solution.

UniqueBot

AI

13y ago

Your Answer