Time lapse photos..

[Oh_Heck]

I'm having some problems pulling this off. I know that you can adjust to shutter to stay open for up to 15 seconds(correct me if i'm mistaken please). I'm trying to get the shutter to stay open atleast 3 seconds while taking a picture, in daylight, of a waterfall(so I can get that smooth silk effect with the water). Do I need a filter or something in order to cut down on the amount of light coming into the camera? How should I go about this..

[ega1]

I haven't tried this, so I don't have any specific values. Hopefully someone else will.

You will need Neutral Density (ND) filters. These are like dark glasses for your camera that don't change the colors (hence the neutral part).

First meter the scene. Let's say you get F8 at 1/500. If you want to slow the shutter to 2 seconds, and I compute correctly, that would be a 10-stop difference. In this example you can't make the aperture any smaller since it is already at F8, so you would need 10 stops worth of ND filters. Please note these numbers are purely guesswork on my part. You would have to get your own values.

By the way, two seconds seems like a really long time. You can probably get the effect you want with exposures of under a second. Either way, you'll need a tripod.

[Oh_Heck]

I think that is going to be the next thing on my list. Stock up on filters. I'll try some settings just under a second exposure time. See if I can get close to the effect until I get my hands on the nuetral filters.

Thanks for the response guys.

[jrbmth]

As far as I have known, time laps photos are when you take a series of photos of a static subject, for example - of a flower at intervals of say 1 hour or so, to photograph its development as it opens up.

What you appear to be discussing is using a slow shutter speed to alow for motion blur as it is known.