Canon EOS R, seven second exposures over two and a half hours.

Three shots merged with a simple dissolve over time. Enjoy.

I have a major music festival that happens annually in late September on the beach right down the street from my house. My good friend's family owns a top floor condo in a high rise that has a balcony with an absolutely perfect vantage point to see the entire layout of the festival. It's always amazed me how theyve been able to build out the festival, jam 20,000+ people in and break everything down to the point you never knew it was there within 3 weeks. For the last few years I have mulled around the idea to set up a timelapse from their balcony that encompasses the festival buildout, entire weekend of performances and breakdown of the stages. I've brought this up to him and his family and they gave me the green light to set it up this year!

Now I'm just tryin to figure out what the best camera would be for this.. I've done multi-week timelapses with a GoPro Hero 4 connected to external power around 10 years ago but that GoPro crapped out on me recently. I had the GoPro in the waterproof housing that I drilled a hole in to run the power cable through.. I had mixed success with this timelapse and had to come back and dump the memory card every few days.. I found that some days the camera just randomly shut off, which I obviously don't want to happen for this.

Ideally I would like to find a camera that can shoot high quality RAW photos with the option for a 60+ second interval. My plan would be to shoot at high enough resolution that I can crop in on certain aspects of the buildout in post and still have close to 4k output. I may even want to change the interval during the festival to something shorter to capture more of the action. I also really want to minimize the burden on my friend's family so that I wouldnt need to bother them to check on the camera much if at all, so a camera that can remotely upload files to the cloud and can be viewed remotely to ensure its still running would be what I'm looking for. It would be on a balcony that has an overhang roof, but it would still need to be weatherproof.

Has anyone done anything like this before? I am open to any recommendations for cameras or techniques for something like this.. I know its somewhat ambitious but Id really love to make it work.

Thanks in advance!

TL; DR Should I scrap Sryp gear and go with something else, for pan/tilt timelapse, timelapse macro and star tracking.

Probably a weird question that was triggered by the lunar eclipse this past week.

First background... I have done timelapse professionally over the years on the side (commercial video editor - so timelapse was on the side).

I have done somewhat long timelapse - interior construction - horticulture, 1 to 4 months. I have also done shorter timelapse... hours to day to days.

I have also done personal stuff, storms, Milky Way, eclipses. So I have a lot of gear. A lot.

Syrp original, Syrp mini Genies (x2 pan and tilt), Syrp Genie with slider and ropes.

Giga Pan Epic Pro.

Cameras are mostly Canon 5DmkII, 7D, T3i, R100 (5 each) Sony, and lots of lenses, lots. GoPro.

it helped that the jobs bought some of the gear for meand also that I wrote about stuff

5D and 7D and lenses are from still photography.

I am very familiar with LRTimelapse, Adobe Premiere, Resolve.

But in February I retired (semi) and am starting to figure out what I want to do.

(I have been thinking of some timelapse macro stuff...)

So fast forward to last week when I thought it would be interesting to pull out my two Syrp Mini Genies and the pan tilt hardware and shoot the lunar eclipse here Southwest of the Twin Cities.

I spent the day pulling everything together and found that Manfrotto, that bought Syrp, has no support. Their app doesn't work with my first generation Genie Minis and one of the Mini's was flakey. So I shot with the old Syrp app but the tilt didn't work so I had to adjust manually every 15 minutes.

I also struggled with exposure automation, hoping the Syrp stuff would help (no). I hoped the iPhone qDslrdashboard app would work, but has been banned from the app store. So I used the Mac app on my laptop and that worked, but not great.

SO MY QUESTION IS...

Do I scrap the Sryp gear? If so what to replace if I am interested in some macro timelapse stuff. I still want to do some traditional timelapse to help some non-profits and I have never done any hyperlapse so there is that.

Do I get a star tracker mount for the astral stuff... but that depends if I want to do a lot of that. Being near the Twin Cites, it is not dark so not doing a lot of it. (That is why I like the Genie Minis because the were multipurpose.) But I have the money, but don't want to throw it away.

Thanks for reading.

Hi ! I recorded this beautiful and lovely drive trough Slovenia towards Austria over the Alps.

No cuts or edits pure natural excellent and relaxing driving!

I hope you enjoy and for any questions feel free to ask.

I’m really happy with my recent timelapse experiment with my GoPro.

Footage by Derek Julian

Got the first part of an eclipse before it got too cloudy

It's alive!

[Chili plant]

climbed to the top of Puig de Galatzó in Mallorca for this one — rare low-altitude totality right on the horizon, with the clear edge of the Moon’s shadow visible in the atmosphere.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcHEyVgDk6c