Best lense to use for a 5D MkII time-lapse?

[nathuk]

I'm going to be creating a time lapse next week - fingers crossed for clear skies!

Anyway, I've a photographer with 3 different lenses which I think were a 50, 25-70 and a 70mm I think!. Which would you say would be best for a time lapse taking into consideration the video footage I'm using for my documentary is 1920*1080?

Cheers guys.

[themos]

The wider the better, I'd say, so the 25-70 wins.

[swag72]

Sorry if I'm being really stupid, but what are you wanting to time lapse? Are you planning on time lapsing the whole sky? In which case the wider the better I would think, or do you have something specific in mind that may require a different FL?

[Photosbykev]

The 5D MkII will capture images 3 times wider than the final output resolution so you have plenty of freedom to recompose your final composition. Assuming you are looking for a good star trail I woud tend to favour the 25-70 which will give you a true w/a FoV with the 5D i.e 71.5 degrees horizontally.

I would suggest shooting full size Raw at iso 1600 with the aperture fully open to maximise the star count and each exposure around 15-30 seconds. Turn the high iso and long exposure noise reduction off so that you can minimise the delay between frames. If you use a remote control use a 2 second delay between frames this will allow the camera to write the data to the CF card so you dont run into buffering problems after 60-70 frames.

Also to avoid aperture flicker in the final video use the twisted lens trick i.e set the camera aperture, press the DoF preview button and with it pressed unlock the lens mount and rotate the lens a few degrees until the aperture display on the camera says 00.

This timelapse

was with a 5D MkII and 24mm lens using the settings above but only 10 second exposures over 6 hours