I got the idea today for my next kick ass time lapse photography project. You may remember, I did one a while ago of the signwriting of a hardside trailer body that we had here at work. I’ve been trying to find something not signwriting related that I can have a crack at and then today, I had that eureka moment!

Tomorrow is the Six Hour Endurance race at Pukekohe. It starts at 2pm in the afternoon and runs until 8pm at night. That is two hours in darkness. When I’m at the race track, I work from the Race Control booth at the top of the members stand. It gives me a view of pretty much the entire race track bar part of the front straight because someone rudely stuck a bridge there and through the dip.

So tomorrow, while working in race control, I will set up my camera, Nikon D200, on a tripod with my super-wide lens (Tokina 12-24 f/4) that I acquired while in the states earlier this year and fire off an exposure every 15-20 seconds. I will need to make a few adjustments etc as the shoot continues, but I expect these to be minor adjustments to simple things like ISO as it gets darker.

So my goal is tomorrow afternoon set up the camera during the lunch break on a tripod on the top level of the members grandstand, set the aperture to f11 or similar, take a shutter speed reading, switch to manual everything and just check my settings every hour or so throughout the evening until the end.

With the 1200-1440 exposures expected, I won’t be shooting in RAW, but JPG, probably medium quality as well. That way I can get 1200 exposures to one 4GB compact flash card. I will be using the battery grip as I can swap batteries out throughout the evening just in case because that was my achilles heel last time I did one of these babies.

Suffice to say, this time around, I’m better equipped/prepared and I think I know what I’m going.

While the time lapse is clicking away, I’m going to spend about 30 minutes taking a handful of long exposure shots on another camera and some bracketed shots at dusk to use for HDR as I’ve never really tried my hand at that either.

But in the words of a mentor, if HDR is turning up at camera club level, its already overused.

Of course, I will share the finished work right here and on twitter/facebook/youtube etc

Any photography projects you have in mind?