Making Long Exposures with a Sony RX100 Mark 7

I bought my little Sony RX100 Mark VII as the centerpiece to this everyday carry backup kit that goes along with my main photography and video rig. This is a little tool kit. We'll set that aside. And by the way, we'll make a video about all this later. But the RX100 right here was just supposed to be a backup, you know, so that I'd have a spare camera. But the more I use this thing, the more uses I find for it. I want to show you how I use this camera and a Pluto trigger to do long exposures. First of all, we need to find a way to hold the Pluto trigger on this thing. Now I have a cage, but I don't really like using the cage if I don't absolutely have to. And that's because the mounting ring somewhat restricts access to the aperture ring on the camera. And this bridge over the top makes it a little harder for me to get my stubby fingers around to the shutter control. So I prefer to use this little L bracket. It's also made by SmallRig. Whenever I can, I find it to be a lot easier. It gives me enough grip because this camera's really small and I got really fat, stubby hands. It also has a nice way to mount a plate or whatever you need to mount. And if you're careful about it, you can do it and still have access to your battery and your card. So I found on Amazon this little extension plate and cold shoe cube. And the link is in the description for all of this stuff. And the Amazon stuff helps us. We have an affiliate agreement with them. So if you use that link, we really appreciate it and it doesn't cost any more for you. We just make a small commission on whatever you buy through that link. Now for this, I always like to keep a little wing nut on here so that I don't accidentally lose the quarter twenty, which I'm about to do right now. So it's just kind of a little safety. I hate to lose that in the field. Let's go ahead and set this up. I'll speed up the video. I'm going to put a little plate on it. For our little demonstration, I have a Manfrotto tabletop tripod. Let's go ahead and mount our Pluto trigger. I already had this, so I just went to their website and I ordered a S2 cable because it's compatible with the RX100M7. I believe it's compatible with just about all of the different models of RX100, but the specifics are listed on their website. So you want to check that if you're going to do this. Make sure you get the right cable. So we'll just mount this up here, plug in the S2 cable, put it in the multi-pin adapter or multi-port adapter. Now one thing with this Pluto, the on-off switch isn't really labeled and I could never remember if it was off or it was on. Well then it dawned on me, the little red O, which is also like a little shutter, if the switch is on to this side with the little red O it's off and if it's over toward the P it's on. So that's just how I remember it. I carry a filter adapter in my little toolkit and I keep a neutral density filter on it in case I'm wanting to do video in some sunlight and I need to have a neutral density filter because this model does not have one built in. This happens to be a Tiffin filter, a .9 and I've got it on a mag filter adapter ring and how this attaches is via a metal plate that has an adhesive back that you stick on the lens housing. Let's go ahead and turn on the camera and I'll show you. The little ring is very small, it's hard to see it, it just goes right around here with an adhesive back. And to be honest with you I wasn't real happy about having to stick something on a brand new camera but it's worked great, I haven't had any problems with it, it hasn't gotten gunky or anything like that and this just snaps on like so. But for doing long exposures we need something a lot darker so I have a 10 stop that I'll go ahead and swap out. This one is a K&F and it's a ND1000 and that's how we go ahead and increase our exposure time to get a long exposure. Okay we're all set up on our test bench and we're going to use our little dragon friend as a model for us. The first thing we need to do is to make some menu adjustments on the camera so that it can get into the bulb mode. So let's go ahead and get into the menu and for this demonstration I've got this long exposure noise reduction turned off. The reason I turned it off is because it doubles the time of the exposure before you can see the results. So if you do a one minute exposure it does that for a minute then it takes another minute to process the noise reduction and then after two minutes you see your result. So for this demonstration I've just turned that off. The next thing we want to make sure we do so we can get into bulb mode is we need to make sure that our drive is in single shooting so that's on tab 1 page 3 and that's where you can have high burst, medium burst, low burst, your timers, etc. So we just want to make sure we're in single shooting. Now you can also do this if you haven't reprogrammed your back button by pressing on the left side of the back button dial and let's go ahead and do that. I'm going to just press on the left side of the dial and I can set it directly from there and don't have to go into the menu. Now next we want to make sure that we're in mechanical shutter. Now mechanical shutter is on the second tab and I believe it's on page 5. It is shutter type mechanical. There's three options. There's auto, mechanical, and electronic. We just want to make sure it's in mechanical so that the Pluto can actually control the camera. Okay, so that's all there is to the menu settings. All right, now that we're all set up and we have our menu settings done, let's go ahead and use our Pluto trigger, make sure it's on, plugged in with the S2 cable. Okay, we're going to go to the app. We need to go, I'm in time lapse right now, so we'll go down here to neutral density filter, down near the bottom. Okay, now we want to make sure we're connected and the best, fastest way to see if you're connected is you'll have a little battery indicator up at the upper right and that lets you know that it is talking. Okay, so I want to do an exposure of about 51 seconds and I have a 10 stop filter right there. Now, if I change my base speed, that's the speed that the camera would natively want to be at for a proper exposure without the filter. So, if that is 160th, for example, we'll get a 17 second exposure if we have a 10 stop filter. Of course, if we had an 8 stop filter, it would be lower, right? So, you can just dial in what filter you have and the length of time you want by adjusting your base shutter speed. So, I want to go for something about 50 seconds. So, let's see, 125th gives us 41, 115th gives us a minute. So, somewhere at 120th, that would be our base speed for the camera. So, let's put that in. You see right now at ISO 100 and an aperture of F5.6, we're at 610th of a second, but that would create a very long exposure. So, we want to go to 120th. We'll just make that adjustment here. There we are, but we're badly underexposed. So, let's adjust our ISO. I hadn't reprogrammed my back button, so I can just click on the right side of it. And I'm going to bring my ISO up somewhere, let's say 800. Well, that's still a little low. So, we'll go ahead and take it up to 1,000. Still just a little low, maybe 1250, and we're right on the money. Okay. So, for 120th, ISO 1250, 51-second exposure on the app, and our 10-stop filter, we should be good to go. Now, before we put the filter on, let's do two things. First of all, let's get our focus. And I half-press the shutter. And then we're going to make sure that we lock that focus, and we're going to do that by going to manual. And I programmed the center back button to toggle between manual and auto, as you can see. So, I'm going to press that, make sure I'm in manual, and let's take a test picture. Okay. Now, we'll have something to compare the long exposure to, to make sure we really have a 10-stop filter, and to make sure all of this is working right. So, let's go ahead and put the filter on. Okay. And we're going to dial our exposure time to bulb, so that the trigger can actually control the camera. All right, we're in bulb mode now. And then from the app, we're at 1.20, that was our base setting. We put the 10-stop filter on. So, all we have to do is tap it. Okay, there we have it. So, let's compare that to our test photo, our reference photo. There's the long exposure one. Let's go ahead and look at our histograms. You see that's 52 seconds at 5.6 ISO 1250, and we'll step back one. Now, we're at 1.20 at 5.6 ISO 1250, and they're pretty close. So, that tells us that our settings are correct, that our methodology is okay, and that we actually do have a 10-stop filter. I've had neutral density filters in the past say one thing, but actually be another, and that's no fun at all, especially when you're doing long exposure work. Okay, I think we're ready to take this to the field. We're all packed up here, ready to go try out our long exposure with our little RX100 Mark VII. Seeing that we're in Florida in the middle of summer, we've got our sunblock and a hat, so I think we're ready to go. Oh, I forgot, we also have our tripod. Now, this tripod's probably not heavy enough to do this long exposure stuff, especially with such a light camera. But it's the heaviest one I've got, so we'll give it a go. I have my shot set up, and I'm thinking about a one-minute exposure could do the trick. So, let's go to the app and see what we need to do. Okay, I'm looking at the app, and I've got 1.125. Seems to be the sweet spot, but I need 13 stops. And on the camera right now, I only have 10 stops. But luckily, I brought some more ND filters, so I'm going to add a 3-stop to it. We've got the 3-stop and the 10-stop on the filter holder. So, let's go ahead and put that on the camera. Notice I've got the door out just a little bit, the monitor out just a little bit, to help with any possible overheating. So, this will go on the camera like so. And we see we have the two filters stacked. So, from our app, we determined we need a little over a minute. I'm going to take the filter off. Okay, we just set the camera to 1.125 because that's what we used in the app to determine how to get a minute with a 13-stop filter. We're exposed just a little bit to the right. That's kind of the way I like to do it. We switched to manual focus, so now let's take our test picture and make sure we've captured it. Looks good. So, we turn our camera to the bulb mode. There we go. And we apply the filter. And we get our app and trigger the camera. Okay, let's compare our results. Here's our test shot at 1.125. And there is our 66-second long exposure. Here's some long exposure samples shot with my RX100 Mark VII and Pluto trigger. Thanks for watching. I hope you found this video informative or at least entertaining. And I hope it encourages you to get up and get out in the world to explore your passion. Bye for now. We'll see you on the next one.