She’s working more/less, but finding an elegant way to enter the time zone is a problem. Right now, the program tries to guess the time zone based on your location, but it’s hard to be certain in areas around time zone borders, and some countries in Asia are all over the place. The top screen is used for debug info until it is reworked to a nicer display.

Alex Lindsay of This Week in Photography called the DS camera controller “Awesome, Awesome, Awesome.” You know what? It is kinda fun. I did some field testing today to work out any kinks. One of them was readability at high-noon. It looks like all of the letters in the interface will have to be changed, black-on-grey was unreadable while white worked fine.

This panoramic was cropped from nine frames, each generated from nine individual bracket shots under DS control. The timing issues have been resolved by rewriting the timing-loop algorithm to not rely on the system clock. The image was taken towards back-lit direct sunlight, but the HDR bracketing made it work. The brackets were compiled to HDR in Photomatix Pro, then stitched in PtGui, and finally cleaned up (5D sensor dust) in Photoshop CS4. It’s good to be a beta tester…CS4 breezed through processing the 100 megapixel result.

I did the quarter-mile hike in carrying only the camera and tripod, DS in my back pocket. I loved not having to carry a laptop to tether, especially since it was hovering around 100 degrees, and I had to climb down & up a 70 foot hill in a hot Santa Ana that seemed to want to move every branch and blade of grass in the frame. This seems a tranquil enough setting, if not a bit dry. That’s ironic because the spot I placed the tripod was once sixty feet under water. What looks like rock at the right is actually a concrete mound, the site is actually “ground zero” of the worst man-made disaster in California history, the collapse of the Saint Francis dam that killed over 450 people as the six story wall of water made it’s way to the ocean fifty miles downstream, erasing entire towns in its path. The landslide that is believed to have triggered the collapse can be seen on the hillside at left.

Someone asked what the “California Cheese” image in a previous post would look like without Nintendo bracketing, here’s what the picture shows when the exposure is set for the foreground:

I just finished this mega-pano controller, a fire-and forget solution that involved physically modifying a Celestron telescope mount to move the camera’s nodal point over the rotational axes, then mounting everything that would normally be cabled to an internal wireless usb hub. Besides the serial-to-usb connector needed to direct the mount and the usb to run the camera, there’s also an added gps and a XGA webcam that mounts to the camera’s viewfinder in order to add a “liveview” function. In order to get the range needed to get very far from the device, the Belkin wireless usb hub was gutted and its antennas were replaced with ones scavanged from a wi-fi router. The whole thing runs off of internal battery power. I do not want to lug this up a mountain.

Ahh, that Cybil Shepard glow. I used a rapid prototyping machine to cover up the nasty gap between where the mount arm used to meet the base and where I had to move it to center the camera. I did this mainly so the airport security dudes wouldn’t think it was an entirely jury-rigged device (hmmm…we’ve got a gps transponder here, Jim.) It lends it a nice finished look and served as the perfect place to mount an antenna. The whole shindig can be set up to run any variety of captures autonomously, run by a program based on the Canon SDK.

In my day-to-day routine I often find myself having to do extensive photographic documentation of objects or locations, only there is often someone waiting to turn off the lights, or move objects, or any myriad of possible interruptions. This is one reason why using a camera tethered to a laptop can be a pain. The computer is a burden to travel with, takes five minutes to boot,  the batteries run low, the ten minutes you had to get the job done just became five…  It occurred to me that if I could somehow tether a DSLR to an instant-on device like an Arduino microcontroller I would have less weight to carry around and could get more work done. After mentally spec’ing out what I would need, I realized the solution was right in front of me - because I bring it with me for Mario Kart wireless races on long night jobs - (In the manner of  John Lasseter’s slow epiphany voice): “Use-the-Nintendo-D-S.” Duh.

God bless devkitPro for providing an ARM9 c++ programming environment. Hooking the camera to the Gameboy cartridge slot took some figuring, but in the end it essentially involves strobing a pin connected through an optical isolation circuit to the camera’s cable release port. This method sacrifices the aperture control that using the Canon SDK allows when tethered to a laptop, however aperture is always the setting that never changes when taking HDR’s.

A funny cool thing happens once the camera is controlled by what is essentially a instant-on computer. Where the Canon 5D can do a bracket of three shots, spread two stops apart, and the latest 1DS MKIII series can do a nine shot bracket, the “DS-DSLR” can do any number of shots, and if I don’t like the way it does it, I can rewrite the software to do it better.

The DS can run in bulb-mode as well, so I can do automated exposures of several minutes beyond the thirty second limit of tethered laptop software, as well as allow for sensor cooling between bursts. This will come in handy when the Astrotrac I ordered from Richard Taylor at the P.A.T.S. show last week finally arrives from the U.K.

It also acts as a very precise intervalometer, which as Amazon kindly points out is a $120 value. But beyond just spacing out shots the timer can be set to run the bracketed exposure range at every timer interval instead.

The fun begins when you start to harness the play value of the DS in conjunction with the DSLR. This audio-based camera trigger function, for example, was trivial to add in, because of the DS’ built in microphone. One such device I found on the web sells for $350. As you can see I need to add a few niceties to this function, like the shot duration and an option for delaying the shot after the sound is recognized. I’m still in beta.

So here is the “first light” from the DS controlled camera. It was meant to be the start of a wide panorama, but when I finally noticed the tagger graffiti all around me, and the cars slowing to see what I was doing, I kinda got spooked and high-tailed it. This was a 16 shot range that was meant to expose for the full moon rising in the last frame of the pano.

I found this cool abandoned gas pump in the Santa Monica Mountains National Park, west of Los Angeles. I guess it’s preserved in the exact state it was in when Clinton left office.

It’s bad enough losing a loved one, but does the Vancouver government have to make it look like they died in a Batman fight?

On our most recent return to the Black Hills, I brought along a Canon G9, and not wanting to deal with the HV20’s DV tapes, I added a Samsung SC-HMX20C SD based HD video camera to the mix. After a while I realized I was having more fun shooting stills with the Samsung. It has a continuous still capture mode that I played around with shooting Mt. Rushmore, and when I pushed the pictures through PTGUI, I found there was so much overlap that the software easily automatically stitched them into a 140MP image. If I had known how simple this was I would have tried to get complete coverage.

Do you remember when the government stole Sue the T-Rex from the Black Hills Institute, auctioned it for several million dollars to Disney and Mcdonalds, railroaded an innocent family man into jail, then as a final insult, the Field Museum mounted the skeleton incorrectly and refuses to consider changes…..? That was so UNCOOL. Read about it here: Rex Appeal: The Amazing Story of Sue, the Dinosaur That Changed Science, the Law, and My Life

During the recent Discovery Channel doco, T-Rex: New Science, New Beast, a scene depicted nearly the entire CT scan of Sue’s skull. “Isn’t that all a CT scan is, an image sequence?” I thought. I recorded a quicktime of the 5 or so seconds of video then dumped them out to a series of bitmaps. Here’s a typical frame from the show:

I located several freeware CT scan processor programs written by university students on the net, some examples are Mricro and Invasalius. The scan processor allowed me to stack the TV frames and create a full, rotatable 3D model of the T-Rex skull for study. There’s even the option of exporting the 3D data as an .stl file for rapid-prototyping, aka 3D printing. I’ll have to try this out on the rumored $1000 HP 3D printer. Just to clarify, at no point in the TV show did they display this image generated from Mricro:

I have no affiliation with any party mentioned in this post. I’m just this guy, you know?

When I developed the 3D human body scanners for the last two Star Wars movies using NTSC technology, I had always hoped to utilize a portable HD capture system that avoids compression artifacts. Now that I’m out of that business (and into 3dlidar.com) I have gone and done it anyways.

The ingredients include a MacBook Pro 15″, a Decklink Intensity, and a PEMINI2X1 adapter. The Pemini (not a rapper) replaces the airport card inside the MB. I figure I could always find a USB 802.11, but I rarely use the wireless network anyways.

The extender cable fit easily through the expresscard slot (Since purchasing the Mac I don’t think I’ve ever used an expresscard anyways) so no modification to the case was needed. TV’s Yoshi had an old power box that had the required 5,12 volt floppy connector, which I snipped off and transplanted onto a wall wart I found in the junk box. I didn’t want to push the design until I knew it worked, so I didn’t search the Mac’s internals for 5,12 power, but to make it truly portable I’ll need to do that or find a suitable battery pack.

On first run, the BlackMagic software suggested updating the Intensity’s firmware, so I knew it was working even before attaching a camera. On plugging the HDMI into a HV20 I was able to see and record 1920×1080 video. I found that without a 7200 rpm drive it would drop frames, so you can see in the image above I’ve replaced the optical drive in the MB with a second hard drive for capture.

I think as a final step I’ll need to 3D Eden print a clean enclosure for the intensity and add a connector so that I can unplug the capture card when not needed.

Welcome to the new PanoCamera. The old blog was created by a custom program that simply became too burdensome to maintain. The old blog can still be read at This Old Site. I haven’t updated the iPod or Zune softwares, although I have dug the Zune out of the junk drawer now that it is the only place one can buy Battlestar episodes. Please forgive the mess until I figure out all the broken links.