How to control your camera from your smartphone or tablet

Michron

Michron from Alpine Labs is $60 (about £37) from alpinelaboratories.com. It’s currently shipped from the USA and so will be subject to VAT, customs fees and a customs handling charge – we’ve been told the total comes to £60 plus shipping costs. The unit should be available directly from a UK warehouse by mid-January 2015.

Michron is similar to Triggertrap Mobile in that it’s app-controlled and attaches to a smartphone or tablet’s headphone socket. There are cables available for 13 camera brands, and a comprehensive list of supported models. It differs from Triggertrap in that, once it has been programmed using an Android or iOS device, that device can be disconnected. The Michron will then sit in the camera’s accessory shoe to control it. The unit runs off a replaceable CR2032 watch battery that lasts for 2,000 hours.

^ Alpine Labs’ Michron can be disconnected from the smartphone once it has been programmed

This approach is neater than leaving a smartphone or tablet plugged in. It also allows for time-lapses that last for many hours, where a smartphone’s battery might not go the distance. However, it rules out certain functions compared to Triggertrap. Essentially, Michron can run to a predetermined schedule but it can’t react to environmental input.

The Michron app doesn’t look as polished as Triggertrap’s but in some ways it’s more sophisticated. It starts with options to set the time-lapse’s total duration and interval. Clicking Advanced reveals options to delay the start, vary the interval over time, vary the shutter speed, use a fixed shutter speed or capture bracketed shots.

Bulb ramping is particularly well implemented. The amount of ramping is set in f-stops per 10 minutes or per 10 frames – an exponential metric that produces smoother transitions than Triggertrap’s linear approach. It’s also possible to limit the bulb ramping to a portion of time within a longer time-lapse. For example, you might have a three-hour time-lapse to capture a sunset, but only ramp the shutter speed for an hour in the middle of the sequence.

^ Bulb ramping on the Michron and Radian is measured in f-stops per unit of time, which gives smoother transitions than Triggertrap’s approach

Bulb ramping with our Panasonic G6 wasn’t entirely successful. We were able to use shutter speeds between 1/10s and 1s but longer shutter speeds seemed to be impossible. The Alpine Labs website suggests that the most reliable results in bulb mode come from cameras with a built-in PC Sync port. Plugging a cable from this port into Michron’s audio socket allows for two-way communication, so Michron can monitor how long the shutter is actually held open.

We experienced some problems creating Interval Ramping curves in the Android app, although the iOS app behaved better. We also noticed a few occasions when the camera intermittently failed to respond to triggers. These issues may be atypical, though. Reassuringly, there’s a 30-day money-back guarantee including shipping, so you can test with your own camera to ensure that it works as expected.

Radian

Alpine Labs Radian is $250 (about £155) plus customs and VAT fees to ship from the USA. According to Alpine Labs, that all comes to £190 plus shipping – standard UK price to be confirmed soon. Radian is essentially the same as Michron but with the added ability to pan the camera. It sits between the tripod and camera, with tripod threads on the bottom and top. The top and base components then rotate in relation to each other to pan the camera. Rather than constantly rotating, Radian moves, shoots, moves again and so on to avoid motion blur in the shots. It feels suitably robust, and there’s an internal battery that’s charged using the supplied USB cable. Alpine Labs also sells an L-shaped bracket to allow for a vertical tilt function.

^ Alpine Labs Radian adds radial movement to time-lapse photography

Radian is significantly more expensive than some rotating time-lapse devices such as the Veho Muvi X-Lapse. However, it’s also much more advanced, with most of the features of the Michron plus the ability to define the speed and direction of motion. Rotation speed can be varied over time by creating a speed ramping curve, although this is offered instead of rather than as well as Michron’s Interval Ramping feature. It also omits Michron’s HDR function, but includes the same sophisticated bulb ramping functions.

As with the Michron, we found Radian’s ramping features to be somewhat temperamental, but the same money-back guarantee applies. For simpler time-lapses with a rotating viewpoint, it was a great success.

^ Vary the speed of rotation using Radian’s Speed Ramping feature

Making videos

We covered time-lapse video production in Multimedia Expert, Shopper 319, so refer to that issue for full details on how to convert a sequence of photos into a video file. If you just want a quick fix, try the free utility called Images to Video, available at http://en.cze.cz/Images-to-video.

Part of the fun of these devices is coming up with new ways to use them. Radian can turn its hand to panorama capture, taking a few dozen shots at regular intervals in a 360-degree circle, ready to stitch together into a single photo. You could take advantage of SLRs and the Michron’s low power consumption between shots to capture a time-lapse that lasts for 24 hours. Triggertrap’s motion detection could be just the thing for capturing wild animals that visit your garden, or to find out who’s been raiding the biscuit tin. We’re sure you can think of lots of other projects to try.

Camera settings

Triggers that use the camera’s wired remote input can control the timing of a photo and possibly the shutter speed, but they have no control over other settings. In some cases it’s fine to leave the camera on automatic settings. However, for time-lapse and other techniques where you need consistency from one shot to the next, it’s best to set everything to manual: aperture, ISO speed, white balance, focus. If you’re not sure about what settings to use, take a photo on automatic settings, note down the settings the camera applied and then replicate them in manual mode. Manual focus is particularly important. Cameras typically take half a second to autofocus, and some won’t get around to taking a photo at all if the trigger duration is too short.

For best results we recommend shooting in RAW mode. Unpredictable lighting may cause a scene to be under- or over-exposed, but shooting RAW and using processing in software such as Lightroom gives far greater scope to colour correct than if you capture JPEGs. You’ll need a big memory card to store hundreds or even thousands of RAW files, but with 64GB SDXC cards available for around £25, this needn’t be an obstacle.

Lightroom’s Sync button makes it easy to replicate RAW-processing settings across the photo set, although you’ll probably need to leave it running overnight as it exports hundreds of images. You can even interpolate processing settings across the duration of a time-lapse sequence using the Panolapse utility.