With springtime, the sun is rising more and more soon every week and shooting seascapes at dawn time is more and more difficult. One day of the past week, i left home at 5am, drove to the Bau Rouge and walked to my favorite place while the sun was just shining. Arrived on the place, i realised that i had left my remote controler at home ...
Remote controler is a nice tool and a good help for long exposures but if you don't have one it can often be replaced by the camera self timer. When you have to shoot serveral long exposures to build a HDR image, the remote controler is really a must : No camera shake means sharp and easy to align images.
So i was very annoyed to have forgotten mine when i remembered that my D200 had an interval shooting function. In this mode, the camera can take n images every x minutes. If you also define a bracketing program, the camera will execute this bracketing program at each interval.
So i put the D200 on the tripod, locked every thing, programmed the camera and ... it perfectly worked : without touching the body, i obtained 7 exposures with 1 IL increment.
With their large bracketing and very fast shooting capabilities, recent Nikon DSLRs are very nice HDR tools. With the interval mode you can perharps save the money of a remote controler and save your day when you left your bed too soon.