Thanks and a feature request

Support for the Solar Eclipse Maestro photography software.

Thanks and a feature request

Postby BobbaLooie » Tue Aug 29, 2017 12:08 am

Well, now that things have calmed down from the big eclipse last week, I have two things to bring up:

1. Thanks Xavier, for a GREAT program that allowed me to capture many high quality images. I still remember my first eclipse in 1979, manually changing shutter speeds, winding the film by hand and hoping I got something at all. I could count on one hand the decent photos. This time, I came away with dozens, due in large part (a VERY LARGE part) to the automation provided by SEM.

2. And now a feature request. Really, a Preference request. I'd like to request a Preference to NOT show the ratio of incremental over regular exposures warning dialog. Here's why:

In my testing, (MacBook Pro/D500) I found that if I used the Live View window for focusing/framing, the image was severely overexposed due to the high contrast/brightness of the sun. IF I modified the shutter speed/aperture in the LV window, then those settings were used for the next scheduled exposure. I set the exposures to (N) to make sure that all settings were restored for each exposure, since this occurred at a non-time critical portion of the eclipse (partial phases). Here's a snippet of what I had in my script:

Code: Select all
# PRE-TOTALITY PARTIAL SEQUENCE
FOR,(INTERVALOMETER),0,300,16
TAKEPIC,MID,-,15:00.0,D500,1/2000,8.0,200,0.0,RAW,None,N,D500 Pre-Totality 5 min sequence
ENDFOR
TAKEPIC,MID,-,10:00.0,D500,1/1000,8.0,200,0.0,RAW,None,N,D500 Pre-Totality 5 min sequence
TAKEPIC,MID,-,05:00.0,D500,1/500,8.0,200,0.0,RAW,None,N,D500 Pre-Totality 5 min sequence


This was my partial phase sequence leading up to totality, taking a photo every 5 minutes. With so much time between exposures, I may or may not have been using LV between any exposures, so I set the update to (N). For every exposure after this, I wasn't going to even attempt to use LV, so the rest of the exposures were update=(Y). However, with so many (N)'s in the mix, I was constantly bombarded with a dialog box--"The 15% ratio of non incremental (N) over regular exposures (Y) is unnecessarily too high. It should be 10% at most to optimize the number of exposures taken in a certain timeframe." This dialog popped up repeatedly during the entire eclipse, even after the (N) exposures were completed. Fortunately SEM continued to take exposures even if this dialog was inadvertently left up, but having the ability to turn the warning off completely would be very nice to have.

Thanks again for a great piece of software,
Bob
BobbaLooie
 
Posts: 1
Joined: Fri Jul 28, 2017 6:26 pm
Location: Lakeville, MN, USA

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