At night "M" does not allow shutter trigger

Canon T3 & tripod
Magic Lantern (ML) intervalometer

For a forum this sophisticated, this falls in the dumb newby category, so please direct me to a better forum if you know one.

I have been pretty successful for time-lapse photography of a mountain landscape
http://www.youtube.com​/watch?v=2_IAlxvCkbE
http://www.youtube.com​/watch?v=JaKuyiZuw7I

But this year i want to bring out the mountain details, maybe the color, so i would like to increase the exposure and/or aperture. The complied jpegs above are simply taken with an automatic landscape setting. So i thot to switch to "M" or "Tv" until i find the right exposure experimentally. The first problem seems to be that the camera shutter does not trip if the light is too low. Experimenting in a room, i can over expose shot with the lights on, but when darkened, my tripping the shutter or turning on ML intervalometer gets me nothing.

What setting to i need to change to get the shutter to work?

Is your lens on auto focus ?

Yes, it is set to auto focus. I take it i should turn this off and try it. (It is a mountain after all, and during non-earthquake nights rarely moves.)

Yep, that was it. The auto focus, because the light level was below ev-1 or whatever Canon T3i does, locked out the shutter trigger. Now the issues become more complex:

For a mountain, with no moon at night:
Tv, Av or M?
I would presume that to get some of the foreground, the trees and grass and such, in focus, i should prefer a small aperture with Av or M, and to include daylight, i should use Av?

And then there is the who issue of ISO. Is automatic ISO ok?

The blankets on the bed look yellow, so i presume i will have problems with white balance. Magic Lantern saves files in .422 format so i don't see how i could use RAW format to fix the white balance after the shoot. Is there a fix for this in advance?

Too many questions. But SteveInNZ, you are great, thanks so much.

tmcdanel wrote in post #17009887
Yes, it is set to auto focus. I take it i should turn this off and try it. (It is a mountain after all, and during non-earthquake nights rarely moves.)

|Have to say that made me laugh
Oh - and good luck

Yes manual focus, you can stop down and keep most of your image in focus.

The other issue is that you have a lot of flickering, because you are autoexpposing.

Since you already have magic lantern, look into bulb ramping as well. Easiest way is to look up something like" time lapse tutorial with magic lantern".