This video is my latest attempt at making a long HDR timelapse video with the Ricoh Theta X. There’s nothing more challenging for a camera than trying to shoot an overcast sky through a window in a dark room without overexposing the sky or underexposing the room. So I left the camera running in our cottage overnight looking at the lake to see how it would fare, and how long it would last on an external battery charge. The video isn’t terribly impressive as timelapse videos go, but if you’re trying to achieve the same thing, you might be interested.

I’ve been trying to shoot very long HDR timelapse videos with the Ricoh Theta X for some time, and it’s proving rather more complicated than I expected, for the following reasons:

• The camera’s built-in timelapse app (called “interval shooting” in the shooting mode menu) has annoying limitations:
  • The camera doesn’t do HDR in that mode
  • The image seems to be slightly “jumpy” from one frame to the next every once in a while - meaning, the POV changes very slightly and creates a small movement that shouldn’t exist in a timelapse video shot from a fixed point. You can see this in my previous timelapse video shot with that mode.
  • When using the internal battery, the app works fine, but can’t shoot more than ~720 images on a single charge. Sadly, when the camera is powered externally, he app seems to crash after shooting between 400 and 700 images. Then after the app crashes, the camera starts drawing a lot of current, overheats and empties my 12,000 mAh external power bank in a couple of hours. I’m not sure why but it’s quite buggy and it won’t take shots as long as I want.

So instead, now I’m using an external Bluetooth intervalometer to capture shots in regular photo mode at regular invervals - namely my trustry Flipper Zero with the BT Trigger app left running near the camera. The camera has no trouble taking regular photos while being powered eternally.

However, the Ricoh Theta X doing the stitching internally, it turns out to be quite a powerful little computer in its own right, and it requires rather a lot of power to process each photo - particularly in HDR mode where it takes several exposure-bracketed shots.

So I’ve been running experiments to see how much power I can feed it through the USB port, using a 45W power supply and a high-quality UBB-C extension cord (so the power supply and the cord isn’t in the shots in the nadir), and also using my power bank’s USB-QC port, so that the camera charges at least as fast as it discharges itself taking photos - or at least doesn’t discharge faster than I need it to run for a given timelapse video’s total duration.

So far I can take up to 17 hours worth of HDR photos on one power bank’s charge and the camera’s internal battery’s charge combined, provided I activate the light/sound off mode to turn off the screen and conserve power, and I don’t take more than one HDR shot every 30 seconds. Any faster than that and the camera will deplete its internal battery faster than the power bank can charge it back up in-between shots.