At some point I'll need to find a source of copyright-free/creative commons music to use for this kind of thing...
Anyhoo, here's some timelapse videos "what I haf made mesel'", using the mahhhhvelous CHDK firmware (see earlier post). One of cress which is a bit dodgy; the PowerShot A560 has one major issue in that the tripod mount is on the extreme left of the camera, so smaller tripods have a tendency to fall over. So the cress was done with the camera resting on a small tube of ducttape and far too close - the focus goes all over the shop. The ice ones are better. For some reason only the Ice Melting video has a "high quality" version on YouTube...
Friday, 12 September 2008
Wednesday, 3 September 2008
Timelapse Photography and CHDK
A month or so ago I nabbed a cheap Canon PowerShot A560 to use as a "experimental" camera. It's higher spec than our trusty Ixus 50 but it's a bit too chunky for holiday snap use. So why did I get it?
Well, it's pretty much for two reasons - first, it has a fairly standard DC power socket. The Ixus doesn't - you need to get a replacement "battery" with a socket in it, and while cheap power supplies that will fit the A560 are available you can't get those battery-alikes for reasonable amounts of cash.
Why the power socket? Well, timelapse photography (of course). While I can stick an 8GB SDHC card in the camera and get 18,000 or so 1600x1200 shots I can't get AA cells that will last the couple of weeks that will take at one shot every couple of minutes...
The other reason is that the PowerShot A560 is one of the Canon range that can use the excellent CHDK firmware extension to add a whole bunch of higher-end features to the camera and a scripting language that can do motion detection, long exposures, and intervalometers - the latter means easy-as-pie timelapse photography.
So for the past few days I've been taking pictures of cress. The results aren't perfect; I didn't have a decent tripod (one problem with the A560 is that the tripod mount is way off to one side of the camera so my little tripod toppled over) so I had to rest the camera too close to the cress in macro mode, which means that the focus is a bit flickery. A second problem is that the images number from 0001 to 9999 - that's a slight issue when you have over 9999 images. The camera handles it okay, creating a new subdirectory for every 2000 images, but I need to find a way to rename the images later to get a single sequence. Anyway, I've done a test render of 9999 frames and it works fine so at some point I'll post it to YouTube.
I also plan to do a couple of videos explaining how to do various things (install CHDK, create timelapse, etc) which I'll also post.
Well, it's pretty much for two reasons - first, it has a fairly standard DC power socket. The Ixus doesn't - you need to get a replacement "battery" with a socket in it, and while cheap power supplies that will fit the A560 are available you can't get those battery-alikes for reasonable amounts of cash.
Why the power socket? Well, timelapse photography (of course). While I can stick an 8GB SDHC card in the camera and get 18,000 or so 1600x1200 shots I can't get AA cells that will last the couple of weeks that will take at one shot every couple of minutes...
The other reason is that the PowerShot A560 is one of the Canon range that can use the excellent CHDK firmware extension to add a whole bunch of higher-end features to the camera and a scripting language that can do motion detection, long exposures, and intervalometers - the latter means easy-as-pie timelapse photography.
So for the past few days I've been taking pictures of cress. The results aren't perfect; I didn't have a decent tripod (one problem with the A560 is that the tripod mount is way off to one side of the camera so my little tripod toppled over) so I had to rest the camera too close to the cress in macro mode, which means that the focus is a bit flickery. A second problem is that the images number from 0001 to 9999 - that's a slight issue when you have over 9999 images. The camera handles it okay, creating a new subdirectory for every 2000 images, but I need to find a way to rename the images later to get a single sequence. Anyway, I've done a test render of 9999 frames and it works fine so at some point I'll post it to YouTube.
I also plan to do a couple of videos explaining how to do various things (install CHDK, create timelapse, etc) which I'll also post.
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