A killer Combination

In preparation for my Icelandic trip, I’ve been honing my timelapse knowledge and skills.

From a camera perspective I’ve decided to use my EOSMs (I have two) as my ‘dedicated’ timelapse platforms, leaving my 5D3 and my IR-50D for stills photography.

This week I took delivery of a new timelapse gadget: the Radian 2

The guys at Alpine Labs (https://alpinelaboratories.com/products/radian-2) have been a pleasure to buy from and have answered all my follow-up questions.

I bought the Radian to increase the drama in my timelapses by adding motion panning. The Radian controls the camera via a USB cable, in my case a 5D3, and allows you to control shutter and aperture etc. The Radian 2 'speaks' to a control/setting App that runs on my iPad.

I had also worked out that I should be able to trigger my EOSM as well: despite noting that the Alpine Labs site says that the EOSM can’t be used with the Radian. The ‘secret’ to getting the EOSM to work with the Radian is, of course, Magic Lantern.

Magic Lantern has an audio trigger mode and the Radian has a 2.5mm audio plug shutter output. Thus all I needed to buy was a 2.5mm (Radian shutter trigger) to 3.5mm (EOSM mic socket) audio cable.

My first attempts, however, didn’t work, as there appeared (sic) to be noise on the line that was randomly triggering the camera.

Thanks to some advice from one of the ML community (thank you Dan) I was educated into some camera settings that I had never looked at, ie in the Movie menu; namely audio gain: which was defaulting to auto. Once I had selected manual and adjusted a few (Canon) settings, the Radian now triggers the EOSM at the correct time.

I’ll be posting more about the EOSM-Radian combination in future posts. For now, it’s worth saying that Magic Lantern enabled EOSM and the Radian 2 are a killer combination for those looking to do motion and Holy Grail timelapses, eg via the ML Auto ETTR feature.