Hi,
Just wondering how long of an exposure folks have taken with their 1Ds III, for things like star trails. I believe that I've seen stories of 30 minutes on a single battery, so I'm wondering how long of shots folks have taken with the battery or with the AC adapter.
So if I have a rebel, put it on bulb and use the remote to start the exposure and the remote to end it? Or do I have to hold the remote the entire time?
On your rebel, if you use the RC1 (the little cheap IR remote) you set the camera to Bulb and also set the drive mode to remote. then you press the button on the mote to start (go away have a coffe) and press to finish.
Wow, I thought this thread had died a lonely death. Interesting that it came back 7 months later. FWIW, the 1DsIII has an amazing battery. Since this post I've taken star trail pics at 5 minute exposures, 1 sec delay then another 5 minute, etc for 7 and a half hours and still had about a 1/4 charge on the battery. I haven't tried a lengthy single exposure though since the 5 minute time with stacking works well.
As others have pointed out you need to decide if you really want a hour+ exposure. If you do that everything in the exposure (trees, sky background, lights in the distance, buildings, etc) will be pretty bright unless it is very dark. I found a more practical solution is use a program like Startrails or one of the PS scripts to stack images. This will let you take a series of shorter exposure (ex. 3 minutes ) and combine them. This results in darker surroundings and with the stars still forming trails. To do this you need to get intervelometer that will repeated take multiple exposures of the desired length. I got mine from eBay for $30 or so.
