This is where the fun starts. Don't plug in your calculator yet.



First, decide what you want to photograph. If outdoors, try to do this at a time where lighting conditions remain fairly constant. Also, try to shoot away from the sun.



Set up your shot - Use a sturdy tripod and don't zoom in too tight. Don't forget that things can change over a long period of time.



Focus - After focusing, switch your camera to manual focus, or use a lock focus feature if your camera has one. This step is very important because your camera might decide to focus on something else in the picture if your subject moves. It won't look very good if the focus is rapidly changing in a video. Also, if you're photographing the sky and there are no clouds in the frame, the camera won't be able to focus on anything at it might not take a picture at all.



Set the exposure - This step might be even more crucial than the focus step. If your camera has a manual exposure mode, or a lock exposure mode, it is very important that you use it. Like with the focus, exposure can change over time and it doesn't look good at all when your video is getting brighter and darker very quickly.



Set Quality - Depending on your camera and how much resolution you want, you will need to adjust your picture quality. My canon rebel can take pictures up to 6.3 megapixels, but this is very unnecessary if I'm going to make a small video to put on youtube.

Also, depending on your computer, it will take a LONG time to open up 200+ photos taken in the highest quality.

So, I usually turn my quality down to the lowest setting.



Some optional steps

Turning picture review off - If you want to save battery life by not having the LCD turn on every time you take a picture, remember to turn the image review off.



Turn camera sleep off - If you're going to be taking pictures with very large delays in between, you'll need to turn your camera sleep mode off. (This will drain battery faster though. If you're really worried about this you can actually modify the program to "wake up" the calculator before attempting to take a shot, this way you can keep the calculator in sleep mode. However, I think this is unnecessary).

