I don’t know how I came to this setting in my Nikon D800 but it’s just great and can save your life if you can’t use a remote shutter.
The thing is that a few days ago the connector where I plug my shutter release fell apart. And you know that shooting brackets or multiple exposures is almost impossible without a remote trigger. If you press the sutter button without a release trigger you will get vibration or movement between brackets, and this will end up with ghosting problems.
With my remote trigger connection broken I only had the chance to take my camera body to the Nikon repair centre, but my previous experiences are to bad and I knew I would loose my camera for a month. The other option it would be to buy the great CamRanger but I couldn’t find it in London and couldn’t wait to be delivered.
On the other hand, I found on internet that a lot of Nikon D800 users have the same problem with this connection so maybe this is a problem related with the construction of the camera.
The good thing is that I found a way to bracket without using a remote shutter, just pushing the shutter button once, at the beginning of the multiple exposures. You need to activate one hidden option in your D800.
- First of all, activate your brackets.
- Turn on the automatic shutter option.
- In the menu, go to the timer section, then to self timer. There go to self timer delay and set the time for the automatic shutter.
Just below the self time opcion there is another setting called number of shots. This is the key setting, if you put a 2 there the camera will shot all the brackets pressing the shutter release just once.
If you have activated the delay shutter option, you will get perfect exposures without any kind of vibration or movement.
Finally you can set the interval between shots, 0.5s is more than enough because you won’t be moving the camera/tripod between exposures.
And that’s all that you need to capture multiple brackets with your Nikon D800 without a remote shutter.
This saved my life while shooting for akromatic.com the other day :)