What settings should I set my camera to if i'm shooting steel wool in light?
My friend and I are going to be doing some photography with steel wool and we will be doing it in a underground tunnel that has lights, what setting should I set my Nikon D5100 to? I've got an idea of what to do without any light but not with some light on. Also, i'm pretty confused on how long to set the interval on the timelapse option, if I want to take a nighttime timelapse of about 5 hours?
Please and thank you!
Questions like this get asked every day, it's a concert, church, indoor sports, a parade or in this case steel wool in an underground tunnel. Then a bunch of so called photographers give some kind of advice or settings.
The truth is, we don't know. We don't have the same camera, the same lens, and the same amount of light with the same subject in the same place, so we don't know what the light meter in your camera is showing, we don't know what your goal is.
It's better to get some photography skills on your own, that's your best bet. The best place to start, understand ISO, aperture and shutter speed and how they are related. Free tutorials are all over the web, use your favorite search engine. Once you know that, you will never have to ask anyone for settings ever again, no matter what the environment.
We keep getting these questions about how to set cameras to get the "best"… You fill in the blank.
You need to learn to use your cameras light meter and using some 500 watt incandescent lamps, experiment lighting the steel wool. Until you can see how the light is falling on the subject, NO settings will do anything for you.
Since photography is all about recording the light that falls on a subject, your idea of shooting in a tunnel without any light is frankly without any merit.
Interval timers can shoot up to 9999 individual images before you have to rest the camera and add more images to the sequence.
Usually if you shoot one photo each 5 seconds, it takes about 2 hours of shooting to get a full minute of animated video.
How do you determine what exposure to use? You have to use the cameras light meter to first determine the correct exposure and then using the camera in the manual mode, start your interval timer
Before you become frustrated with your fine fully adjustable camera, spend some time on this link learning how to balance shutter speed, ISO and the lens aperture
http://camerasim.com/camera-simulator/
Only you can answer that its why the camera has a light meter
For the steel wool, the particular model of camera does not matter. It depends on what effect you are trying to achieve. If you want the background out of focus you will need a wide aperture. If you want everything in sharp focus you will want a small aperture. Assuming you are using a tripod, or resting the camera on a solid surface so that you don't shake or move the camera, shutter speed won't matter. Set the aperture you want on the "A" setting, choose the angle, aperture and focus point you want and let the camera choose the shutter speed for the effect you want.
If you want to over or under expose to pick out highlights or shadows then use the exposure compensation button. Alternatively use HDR and get both improved shadows and highlights.
For the best results don't use auto white balance. Either set it to the type of lights you are using or do a white balance reading. Don't forget to set it back afterwards though. The D5100 will remember white balance settings even after it has been switched off.
The timelapse settings will depend on how fast you want things to appear to move and how long you want the resulting video to be. If you take 1 frame per minute the end result will be just 300 frames in 5 hours (5 hours x 60 minutes at 1 picture/minute). When you play back at 24 frames/second that would last just 12.5 seconds. If you take a frame every 30 seconds, the resulting video would last twice as long, but the animated movie would appear to move at 1/2 the speed. Just do the maths for the length of movie and speed of animation that you want. You may need to experiment, recalculate and reshoot.
I agree with Sound Labs. The conditions you describe, and the possibilities of settings on your camera are so variable that it is impossible to give sensible advice. Maybe just set everything to Auto.
Read the handbook to find out about time lapse. If you can't understand every detail then do some tests before you go underground - tests cost nothing in digital. I assume you have a good tripod.