Having recently gotten really into time lapse photography and coming up with several ideas of my own, I finally set about trying to find a good intervalometer to start doing my own time lapses.
An intervalometer is a tool that allows you to take multiple shots with a set period of time in between each shot.
After doing a lot of research online, I settled on the Pixel TW-282. Even though that name makes it sound like a component inside a fax machine.
All the reviews I read about it were very positive. The only gripe people seemed to have was that the price was a little higher than they expected. That wasn’t much of an issue for me as I’d rather spend a bit more money on a better product to have the confidence that if I wanted to walk away from my camera it would continue to take shot after shot without me having to constantly hover over it.
This bad boy is loaded with every feature you could want from a shutter release. It has single shot, multi shot, bulb mode, delay and interval.
Now, I didn’t buy it for the features that
So for the purposes of this review, I’m going to concentrate on the intervalometer feature. I will cover the bulb mode in a seperate post when I review the
At first, it was hard to try and figure out how to set it up in interval mode. The instruction booklet that came with it was wordy but didn’t really help a whole bunch. I eventually managed to figure out how to set it up and got it working through trial and error over an afternoon. It wasn’t that hard to figure out, but it would had been nice if the instructions were a bit more idiot proof.
You can set it to do intervals in seconds, minutes and hours. The shortest you can do is every second. Which may be an issue for a small group of dedicated intervalometer enthusiasts, but there’s ultra high end stuff for that market. A shot a second will probably be enough for anything I will ever do.
The longest time you can set in between shots is 99 hours, 59 minutes and 59 seconds. Why is goes that high baffles me. Your camera battery will die or even turn itself off long before it gets to 24 hours let alone 99 hours. But it’s good to know that it covers a really wide range of time frames.
Since I had already learnt how to set it up before hand, I decided to try my first time lapse during Scott Kelby’s Worldwide Photo Walk event. To learn more about my set up and the post processing of the time lapse, check out my blog post on it.
It worked exactly as I hoped and didn’t miss a single shot. Initially, I thought that the noise of the shutter going off every second for 30 minutes would drive me crazy. But it was surprising how quick you get used to the noise and eventually don’t even notice it.
One thing that I only really noticed when setting it up was that you can’t set it to shoot for a given time frame. For example, I wanted it to take a shot every second for 30 minutes. But I coudn’t find a way to set that 30 minute timer. Which meant that I had to take a note of when I started the shoot and keep an eye on the clock for when the 30 minutes was up.
You may actually be able to set that time frame on it and I just haven’t worked out how yet. But even if you can, it was not an obvious option to set up even after me looking through the manual. Which is a point against it in my book. It’d been nice to have that feature; but it’s not the end of the world. But keep that in mind if you plan on doing anything over a very specific period of time.
Another thing that I noticed later on in the afternoon when I was trying another shoot was that if your memory card becomes full, it will continue to fire off shots. Which could be an issue if you don’t pay attention and you think it’s still taking shots but it actually stopped saving images some time before. Now the obvious answer is to get a bigger card, but that is something to be aware of when doing any time lapse photography.
I’m very happy with my purchase. It may have cost me a little bit more than your more run of the mill intervalometers, but as I said before I’d rather pay a bit more for the quality and peace of mind.
I think this piece of kit is going to be invaluable to me as I continue to experiment with time lapse photography!