I recently purchased a great little camera: The Sony Nex 5.
In addition to being extremely compact, it takes great still photos and HD video as well. One of the things, however, that’s a bit more challenging is setting up the Nex 5 to take time lapse photos.
I haven’t spent much time doing time lapse photography, and I (mistakenly) assumed that all modern cameras would be capable of time-lapse photography right out of the box. Wrong.
Not only do you need a special piece of equipment (usually called either an Intervalometer or a Timer Remote), but there are currently almost none of these available for the Nex 5! In fact, in all my online searching I was able to find only one device that would enable time lapse photography on the Nex 5 – unfortunately it’s a UK product that, once you figure in shipping costs to the U.S., is a bit pricey.
What to do? Well, it turns out, some people have had some luck putting together a DIY Intervalometer using easily available parts from Amazon.com. I took a page from them and set out to build my own… after a little trail and error, I was successful and decided to post a detailed tutorial on How To Build Your Own Intervalometer / Timer Remote for the Nex 5 – hopefully it’ll help any other Nex 5 owners out there who are interested in doing their own time lapse photography.
Check out this sample Nex 5 time-lapse video to get an idea for the potential:
See the tutorial: how to build a DIY Nex 5 Intervalometer / Timer Remote here.
14/03/2011 at 7:06 pm Permalink
Very nice sample. I have taken hundreds if not thousands of night time astrophotos since I was a teen in 1967 with my parents Kodak Hawk-Eye Box Brownie camera and later my own 35mm Mamiya Sekor 1000DTL which got me noticed with award winning images, then more recently my Sony Cybershot image of Mount Hood is in the NY Times “A Moment In Time”. I still have all these cameras from my youth in storage. Now my hand drawn pastels of the moon and other celestial objects will land occasionally in NASA web pages. But I will glean from your advice to set up my new Sony NEX5 to do some mind blowing time-lapse filming soon of beautiful Portland cityscapes with sun and moon setting with cloud motion like a new wave Koyaanisqatsi. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sps6C9u7ras to unleash to my Facebook friends and the world. Isn’t technology wonderful when it works and Sony brings good things to life even more than Edison General Electric? Poor old Edison must be rolling in his grave about now- Many youth may have forgotten that he was the original inventor of audio recorded sound and cinematography.
Thank god we have the whole backdrop to film here in Portland Oregon; the sky and weather and all. Thanks for the technical inspiration Luke! – Mark
14/03/2011 at 8:26 pm Permalink
My pleasure, Mark! Thanks for taking the time to comment. I’m glad that the article could be of use.
Sounds like you’ve done some really great stuff. Astrophotography/astronomy is something that’s fascinated me since I was a child as well. In fact, I’m hoping to set up the Nex 5 to take some photos of the night sky during my road trip this summer – I’m thinking the skies at some of the national parks on the west coast should be perfect.
Your time-lapse cityscape project sounds really interesting – you’ve definitely got some gorgeous landscapes out in your area. I’d love to see some of the shots once you get underway…
13/05/2011 at 9:18 pm Permalink
Hi again, what is the UK-based bit of equipment you stumbled across? I’ll see if I can get hold of it…
Thanks!
18/05/2011 at 9:32 am Permalink
The device I mentioned is called the gentLED-Auto and from everything I’ve read, it’s a great little device. You can check it out here: http://www.gentles.ltd.uk/gentled/auto.htm
By the way, I checked out your site – great music!