Promote Control

For the last little while I have been putting some serious thought into doing some time lapse photography. I was also thinking of how I could add in my own personal taste for HDR. While watching a recent episode of D-Town TV they talked about the Promote Control and how you could use it to improve your HDR by increasing the amount of exposures that you can take. When I researched the Promote Control I found that it not only does HDR but time lapse as well. Suffice to say that I started drooling at once.

One of the problems that I face with having an older camera is that when I shoot HDR I can only bracket them in groups of 3 shots. So that would look like -2,0,+2. Now as RC explained on D-Town, the jump that your software has to make in order to interpret the balance is quite a bit; a full two stops. With the promote control you can bracket as much as you want! So you can make the jumps a lot easier and thus obtaining a more balanced HDR photo.

The Promote control is pricy at around $329.00 but the ability and worth of this remote is priceless. One of the features allows you to go beyond the 30 sec limit when bracketing in low light conditions. This is something that I have experienced a bit when shooting near the tail-end of the blue hour. What that means is that when you are trying to bracket and the camera will say something like -2 20 secs., 0 30 secs., +2 30 secs. When you pull that into photo matix you will have to then manually to it which exposures are which and you are almost guaranteed a poor image. You can also get the remote to perform a lot of automatic functions like mirror lock-up and whatnot. Something that if you are shooting star trails you’d want to have.

This seems to be something that could increase your abilities and push your HDR photos to the next level without shelling out large amounts of won for a high end camera. The results are amazing too just check out this video of an HDR time lapse. If that is not enough to convince you, I am not sure what else I can say…

 

Sun setting over Beetham Tower in Manchester, July 2011 from Joby Catto on Vimeo.


Jason Teale 

Photographer, educator, podcaster

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Photographing Korea and the world beyond!