Gear Review: Aodelan WTR2 Intervalometer and Remote Shutter Release

A useful piece of kit for long exposure photography, time-lapse photography and for not having to touch the camera when you’re trying to minimise camera movement on your tripod.

These are my first impressions of this piece of kit, which I ordered from Amazon, for £69.99. Seems like a lot of money, but is it worth it?

NB - There are different options for different camera brands, so make sure you select the right one for your camera. 

I should point out that this review is on the second unit I was sent; I had to return the first one as the transmitter and receiver wouldn’t pair with each other, and after much research, reading and re-reading of instructions, more research, experimenting, more research and even making sure there were no other devices  around which could have been interfering with the signal, I was still unsuccessful. The unit came from Amazon, so the return was quick and easy and I ordered a new unit. 

What do you get in the box?

I have the wireless version of this so you get the timer/intervalometer, a hot-shoe mountable receiver, 2 cables for plugging the receiver into the camera (even though it’s wireless, there are no hot shoe contacts to allow communication with the camera but this receiver does have a thread to mount on a tripod) and two wrist straps, which is great if you are like me and always putting things down all over the place. 

I have opted not to install the strap on the receiver because, like many of you who will be considering this, we are trying to limit any camera movement and having this blowing all over the place could introduce tiny movements into your shots and would defeat the objective!

There’s an instruction manual, which is fairly basic and gives you an overview of the functions, but I will admit, I have had to watch a couple of YouTube videos to fully get to grips with it. 

Batteries are not included and you will need 4 AAA batteries, two for each part of the unit. There isn’t a battery indicator on the unit, so it’s difficult for me to say what the battery life of the unit is like. 

My first impressions

The first thing to notice about this is that the plastics seem fairly solid, but I wouldn’t want to bash it about too much. The buttons are really tactile and press with a rather satisfying click. The whole thing feels fairly well made, considering it’s definitely been built down to a price.

The largest button on the unit is the shutter release button (this is a rubber button so feels a bit more controlled/repsonsive). As you would expect, this is a two stage button, which focuses your camera when you half press and releases the shutter when you full press. 

When you turn the transmitter on, it beeps and the screen is backlit green. This light turns off after a short time to save battery power, but you can adjust the setting so it’s always on or always off. This is the same for the beep that it emits when you perform some of the functions. 

Navigating your way around the transmitter is fairly easy and it pairs itself with the receiver (when you have a working unit!). The downside here is that if someone else is using something on the same frequency then you could end up with some crossover, which could be a pain in the rear end!

Functions

The kit will allow you to shoot in bulb mode, release the shutter and record intervals as little as 0.1 second, use a delayed shutter (2s), shoot in continuous mode and create “programs” to shoot timed intervals. You can specify the number of shots you want to take from 1 up to 199. The other option is “unlimited”. You can also shoot bracketed long exposures using this piece of kit, but I have discovered that I prefer to set these up using the interface on my camera rather than using the Aodelan. 

One thing to note, which I had to find out by experimenting with settings is that if the bracketed long exposure function is set to on, then you will not be able to set the number of exposures in your programme to unlimited, so make sure that this is turn off if this is something you are going to be using the unit for. 

I have tested the unit(s) at a distance of around 5 metres, indoors and outdoors and have managed to get a decent connection. Unless you’re using it to take self portraits from a long distance then I’m not sure what the use case for having a huge range on this would be as in most use cases, I would suspect that you would be standing within a “sensible” distance of your camera. 

I’m not going to go into masses of detail about how to program the unit; there are a number of YouTube videos that will take you through this, with realtime examples rather than sitting and reading them all here, but suffice to say, it’s easy enough to use and to program and within about 5 minutes of playing with it, I was able to feel confident enough with it to be able to take it out on a shoot and would be confident to use it in my studio when I am doing things which mean that the camera can’t move and I’m not able to shoot tethered. 

Summary

All in all, I think this is a great little piece of kit which I am looking forward to using and experimenting with more in the field. It’s lightweight and its small(ish) form factor (I wish the receiver were smaller, but having the hot-shoe mount bulks it out a bit) means that it doesn’t take up too much valuable space in your camera bag. If I could change anything about, it would be swapping the AAA batteries and replacing them with a USB rechargeable one. I don’t know what the battery performance is like at the moment and it’s difficult to say as there isn’t a battery readout on the display.