Melting Ice - Time Lapse Photography with the D3

Generally speaking, I feel like I have a pretty decent grasp on the functions available on my cameras. However, every now and then I stumble across something that I've overlooked, and in many cases it can turn out to be pretty cool.

Take for instance the Nikon D3's Interval Timing feature. This feature allows you to program the camera to take multiple photographs over a specified period of time. Wanting to give it a shot, I stuck a wine glass full of ice on the kitchen counter, and programmed the camera to take a photo every 30 seconds, for 4 hours. The result? 480 images of the ice melting over time, compressed into a 20 second movie using Quicktime Pro. First I'll show you the movie, then I'll tell you how easy it is to do. I'm not sure what caused the glitch at the beginning of the video, but we'll work that out in the future.

Pretty cool if you asked me. Especially since all you have to do is capture your images (using a tripod would be my recommendation), and put them in a folder. Open up Quicktime Pro, then go to File->Open Image Sequence and select the folder with your shots. That's it, you're done. Quicktime will allow you to export in a number of different formats, so before you know it, you can be making time-lapse movies as well! Enjoy!