Nikon D7000 manual Interval Timer Shooting

270David Busch’s Nikon D7000 Guide to Digital SLR Photography

■Manual movie settings. Select On if you want to adjust shutter speed and ISO sensitivity while shooting movies with the D7000 in Manual exposure mode. Note that, due to the interval required between frames, shutter speeds no slower than 1/30th second can be used. Speeds up to 1/8000th second are possible, and ISO settings from ISO 100 to Hi 2 can be used. Exposure compensation cannot be used.

Interval Timer Shooting

Nikon D7000’s built-in time-lapse photography feature allows you to take pictures for up to 999 intervals in bursts of as many as nine shots, with a delay of up to 23 hours and 59 minutes between shots/bursts, and an initial start-up time of as long as 23 hours and 59 minutes from the time you activate the feature. That means that if you want to photograph a rosebud opening and would like to photograph the flower once every two minutes over the next 16 hours, you can do that easily. If you like, you can delay the first photo taken by a couple hours so you don’t have to stand there by the D7000 wait- ing for the right moment.

Or, you might want to photograph a particular scene every hour for 24 hours to cap- ture, say, a landscape from sunrise to sunset to the following day’s sunrise again. The D7000 can do that, too, and, in fact, offers most of the features of the expensive ($130) Nikon MC-36 Multi-Function Remote control. Nikon has done us all a huge favor by including this functionality essentially for free! I will offer two practical tips right now, in case you want to run out and try interval timer shooting immediately: use a tripod, and for best results over longer time periods, plan on connecting your D7000 to an external power source!

The Interval Timer Shooting screen (see Figure 8.33) is confusingly designed, in my opinion. It’s needlessly complex; the display changes in a quirky way depending on what information you’re entering, and some portions of the screen aren’t accessible until you’ve performed a prerequisite function. I would have set up this menu with nothing more than five entries, each with their own screen of options: On/Off, Start Time, interval delay, total number of shots to expose, and the number of shots in the burst per inter- val (if more than one image per interval is desired).

To set up interval timer shooting, just follow these steps.

Before you start:

1.Set your clock. The D7000 uses its internal World Time clock to activate, so make sure the time has been set accurately in the Setup menu before you begin.

2.Select release mode. If you want to shoot bursts of images each time an interval

elapses, set the release mode dial to CL (Continuous low speed; pictures will be taken at the rate specified in CSM #d6) or CH (Continuous high speed; pictures will be taken at a rate of up to 6 fps). If you prefer to take one picture per interval,