Electronic shutter option on D600/D810 for time lapse

i am interested in taking time lapse videos at approximately 1 frame/second over 30 minutes - 1 hour of sunrise or,sunset. Is there a way to,do this on the D600 or D810 that doesn’t require cycling the mechanical shutter 1800 - 3600 times?

I don't think any of the Nikon DSLR has a fully electronic shutter but only front curtain electronic shutter thus the shutter still need to cycle with every shot.

There's one other concern I have with the poster's question....leaving a shutter open for 30 minutes with a bright sun in the image. That might cause physical damage to the sensor or other camera electronics. You'll certainly get *a lot* of saturated pixels. But I'm not an engineer to know that for a fact.

I don't think any of the Nikon DSLR has a fully electronic shutter but only front curtain electronic shutter thus the shutter still need to cycle with every shot.

 

The D850 can go fully electronic ("silent live view"), but you have to have the camera in live view mode, which in this case means leaving everything powered up for hours. It depends entirely on the electronic readout speed, meaning you'll get more rolling shutter than the mechanical shutter would.

 

I wouldn't be too scared of cycling the shutter that many times (no more than leaving everything running for an hour) unless you're planning to do it daily, but I suspect you'll be pushing it close on the battery, if not card space. Also... when you say "sunrise" or "sunset", you're not actually talking about pointing the lens at the sun for an hour, are you? LensRentals published some images of what happened when someone pointed a supertelephoto at the solar eclipse and wasn't prepared for it melting the aperture blades...

possibly leaving the camera pointed at the sun for an extended time whether it its taking pictures or not might allready be harmfull for the canera, unless really strong filters are placed in front of the lens.. , i think.

Also with filters , heat buildup might be needed to get controlled in some way ...

I wasn’t planning on pointing the camera at the sun. I was going to start at twilight and then capture the gradual illumination of the city lights in the evening, or the alpenglow On the Eastern face of the Sierras prior to sunrise

Ah! That's reassuring. Sorry to be paranoid, chuck.

 

Back to your question: other than shooting two 30-minute videos back to back and pulling the frames out of them (which would be 2MP...) then I don't believe there's a way, and if there was you'd probably be running into heating problems for keeping the sensor and battery live. I suspect you're better just taking the hit to the longevity of your shutter - although I'd encourage you to use a non-G lens and use its aperture ring to set the exposure for consistency. You might need a grip or external power, or to swap batteries at some point part way through, though.

 

Good luck - it sounds interesting.

Did you say you want to do it for 1 hour? Well that's only 3600 shots. I wouldn't bother to try to minimize the shutter count. Andrew! Can you do that in 8K with your D850 and the shutter won't cycle that much? 8K is close to the max resolution of the D850 and more than that of the D600.

Me BeBu? I was arguing for shooting normally as well.

 

You can shoot in full resolution (and raw) in silent live view on the D850. I haven't checked, but I doubt the time lapse feature (which can be configured to 8k) tries to do this. The 30fps "8MP" live view mode on the D850, one on other hand, only dumps jpegs, and I suspect you may as well record 4k video.

Oops, that'll teach me to RTFM. Time lapse on the D850 is optionally silent (the shutter can stay open). But I probably wouldn't do it for an hour because I'd probably guarantee some dust landing on my sensor. :-)