Hey, welcome to another Flarecorp Media camera gear thing.
I'm Jason and today I have the Vello Shutterboss II camera remote control.
Now what this is is a remote control you plug into your camera and then you can fire the
shutter manually or you can use... this one has timer functions so it has a self timer,
it has a long exposure timer, and has a time-lapse timer and you can combine all three of those
functions together to do a long exposure time-lapse selfie.
Anyway, I'm going to open this up and take a look at it and see how it works together.
Okay, there's not a whole lot in the box.
There's the box, the instructions, batteries that I've already installed, and the remote
control.
Now, what I've seen is there's about five different models of this at least.
All of them have the same remote control, but then they change out the connector based
on what kind of camera it needs to connect to.
So I have the sub mini, the 2.5 millimeter plug, that works with my Canon and my Fuji
that I'm currently filming with.
Finally peel off the plastic.
Woo.
That was not a very good peel.
Let me connect it to my camera we'll take a look at some of the features.
So it does run on two AAA batteries.
The instructions say the battery life is as follows.
Powered by two AAA batteries, it can take approximately two months of continuous shots
with a delay of five minutes between exposures and an exposure length of 4’ 56” which
I translate to mean a long battery life.
So if we come here, and... you always make sure it's off when you're going to plug in
a remote control into your camera.
So I'm using my Canon 70D.
You can see right there.
It's just a little remote control port.
Plug it into there.
So the first thing to note is we can actually control the shutter without even turning on
the device.
So it has a mechanical shutter down here and so if we, it does support autofocus, so if
we hold down halfway it's going to do just like you would holding down a shutter halfway.
You can see it focusing there and push all the way and it'll take the exposure.
It also has if you set your camera to bulb mode and as long as we hold it it will take
the exposure.
And you can also take longer exposures so if you're doing like night photography, you
can push in and slide up and it's going to lock it and it's going to keep running your
bulb.
And then when you’re dong you can just slide it down.
The shutter button also works without any batteries in it, which is a nice touch.
So let's go ahead and turn it on now.
We need to push the power button for about three seconds.
It's also the timer starts stop button.
Okay, so it turned on.
Now, let's quickly go over the interface here.
You have a back light / lock button, so if we push that it's going to, one time, it's
going to turn the backlight on.
You probably can't see it right now because we're out in the middle of the sunlight, but
tap that in the backlight is going to stay on for six seconds.
If you push and hold it, it's going to lock it with the L and so then anything we do it
won't do anything so you have to push and hold the lock again to unlock it.
You have your set which gets you into the menu of setting everything and the arrow keys
to navigate around once you're setting stuff and then you have the timer start stop button,
so if you push that it's going to start doing whatever we have programmed into the menu
and then, like I said, to turn it off you push and hold this again for three seconds.
That's going to turn it off.
It does have a indicator light as well as a beeping.
So now that it’s turned on let's try that long exposure again.
If we do that it's going to start counting up.
You can hear it actually beep every second.
And yes you can turn off the beep.
I have it on just so you can hear all the times that it will beep.
So up here we can see we have the self timer, the long exposure timer, the interval timer,
and the number of shots to take as well as controlling that beep.
So to get in here and start changing things we can push the set button and hopefully you
can see that black bar is underneath the self.
So that means we're changing the self timer.
So this would be if you wanted to set a self timer and run in front of the camera obviously
or if you were doing a long exposure and didn't want to touch the camera and maybe even jiggling
the cable, you're doing something so sensitive, you had your macro shot set up or something,
that even touching this you're afraid it's going to throw your focus off on your camera,
so you can set a self timer.
If we come here and just set it to you know, two seconds.
To go ahead and start doing any of your timer functions then, so we have just the self timer
right here, so we just hit that start stop button one time.
And it went ahead and took the picture.
To clear anything you have in here, you just push the lock and the power button at the
same time just real fast.
This will clear everything.
It will clear every single setting so keep that in mind.
There's no way to just clear individual, like self, long, no you're cleaning everything
out.
You also cannot set multiple programs so you can't have like a nightscape one and a indoor
one.
It's one or nothing.
So you can set hours, minutes, and seconds and your limited to one second under a hundred
hours on all these menus so try to keep things below that.
If we come over here to long exposure and do the same thing we can say that okay, we
want our long exposure to be for six seconds and so in order to do a long exposure obviously
you have to have your camera in bulb mode.
And if we start that.
It's going to count down.
This is taking the shot immediately.
So it finished that shot.
Okay, so I've taken it off of bulb mode so that I can show you the interval mode.
So I've cleared out my long exposure and we’ll just come over to interval and come in here
and make some adjustments so I want one every five seconds.
This will only take one shot so I need to come over to number and tell how many shots
I want to take.
Sso let's do five.
So we're all ready to go.
So if I just hit the timer start stop.
And it counts down from from 3, 2, 1 is when the beeps come.
So you could have like a 20 second timer, it will only beep on the last three seconds.
And anytime it's going, you can stop it just by pushing the timer start stop, even in the
middle of a run.
The number of interval shots is limited to 399 or it can be set to infinity by selecting
the dash dash option.
Now let's say you want to combine the two, so you want to do a long exposure and an interval.
So we can come back over here to long exposure and let's do a one second exposure and one
thing to note is that the interval does not take into account the long exposure timer.
So if you set a five second interval and do a one second exposure there's only going to
be four seconds in between shots because both timers run concurrently.
So if you had a three second long exposure and you wanted a 10 second interval in between
shots, then you would need to set your interval timer at 13 seconds because it would run those
three seconds while the shot is happening and then continue to count down the rest of
the 10 second timer that was left.
So I've got one second, well just for fun let's make it two seconds to show it off a
little bit more, and we'll bring this, whoops, we'll bring this up to six seconds.
And we'll go ahead and...
I do need to move this back into bulb mode, otherwise it won't do the long exposure.
So that was one second.
One thousand one ish.
So pretty self-explanatory and you can combine all three actually so if you wanted to do
a self-timer.
So you can come here and do, you know, four seconds.
So self timer only runs before the first shot and then after that it goes into the intervals
that you have set, so if I do four seconds and hit start it's going count on those four
seconds.
It’s going to take the first shot and then it’s going to be running into the interval.
You can see the count then of how many shots are left.
Yeah, so the light does light up while it's taking that exposure.
One more thing to note using the interval timer is if you're using a flash you need
to take into account how long your flash is going to take to recharge.
So if your flash takes four seconds to recharge, if your interval is set to three seconds,
your flash isn't going to be firing with every shot.
So you need to add that time in as well.
Something else to keep in mind when you're using the interval timer is that if your camera
is set to automatic focus, but it takes longer to find the focus then there is time between
shots, it won't take the next photo.
And that final menu is just that beep so if we push set we can come in and turn it off.
One final trick this has is you can trigger this shutter manually in the middle of a timer.
So if you had a 15 second timer going and something interesting came in your shot that
you want to make sure you got perfectly and frame you can press the trigger button to
capture it and your timer will continue running as normal without interruption.
So why use this if your camera, say like my Fuji XT3 here, if your camera has an internal
interval timer.
It can do everything I just showed you all by itself.
Well, one reason is the fact that sometimes this is in and inconvenience spot, like I'm
doing ashra photography on a Star Tracker, the camera might be hanging upside down and
that's kind of awkward reach down there and check your settings.
Things like that.
Also, it's just handy to have it all in one spot.
Instead of having to navigate menus on your camera and work with that.
You can just set this all up.
Plus it remembers, as long as you don't turn it off, it'll remember your settings and before
I realized you could turn this off, I thought the LCD was on all the time before I realized
you could push and hold the button to turn it off, I left this on for about a week straight
and it remembered my settings the whole time.
So you can do that as well.
Another nice feature is the fact that this shutter button works all the time.
It's mechanic…
Well, mechanical, but then electrical.
It’s physically connected with the camera.
My phone can connect to my Fuji and it does have the same functionality where I can control
the shutter remotely via Bluetooth and I can lock the shutter to keep it open as long as
I want, but it only works about 75% of the time.
The Fuji App is pretty dang good as far as camera apps go compared to the Canon and Sony,
but the 25% of the time that it doesn't work is a pain in the butt because then I have
to spend about two minutes restarting everything, turning the app off, turning Wi-Fi off, urning
the camera off.
And so just knowing you have physical control over the shutter is a time saver and increases
your reliability when timing is really important.
Anyway, that's going to do it for this quick video.
If you want to pick up your own shutter boss, I will have this one linked in the video description
down below and once you're there you can browse and find the other ones if you need a different
connector for like a Nikon or an Olympus or something.
Just for the record this one is the canon sub mini connector but like I said, it's any
camera that can use a sub mini connector, this will work.
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