If You’re Photographing And You Know It Clap Your Hands

December 18, 2010 by Joseph Thibodeau 9 Comments

If you’ve ever tried to take pictures of yourself you’ll know that it can be a pain. It’s especially hard to get that perfect shot of your godly features when you’re out of breath from sprinting across the room. OK, yes, they have remote controls for that. But what if you lost your remote or you just don’t want to have to carry it? [LucidScience] put together a sweet, um, “hands free” alternative.

Essentially this hack emulates the IR signals sent by a Nikon remote, either to take a picture right away or to take time lapse photographs at regular intervals. We’ve seen a similar time lapse remote using an arduino before and a really thorough one using an AVR, but they don’t take the same approach as [LucidScience]’s design in terms of monitoring a microphone input for triggering. The project includes several status LEDs and adjustments for ambient noise and triggering, and it can be mounted to the camera body. We wonder how many of the Nikon’s features could be controlled using clap encoding, and how detailed your timing would need to be to have a kind of hand-made (get it?) pulsetrain syntax. You’d probably need to have world record clap skills.

Check out the demo vid after the break.

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Using A Chicken As A Steadicam

December 11, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 61 Comments

This has been circulating around the net for a bit. For those that haven’t seen it, let me just give you a quick rundown of what is happening. This guy strapped a camera to a chicken’s head. No really, that’s it. There’s some interesting science behind it though. He’s taking advantage of the Vestibulo-Ocular Reflex in the chicken. It is basically the reflex that we use to keep our eyes firmly focused on something while our head is moving. In a chicken however, they move their entire head. This means that he can strap a camera to the chicken’s head and have an instant steadicam. At least that is the theory. As you can see in the video after the break, the harder part is getting the chicken to look at what you want it to look at. We also found a conversation about it with the creator,[MrPennywhistle] in some reddit comments.

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You Know That They Say About Guys With Big Lenses?

December 1, 2010 by Mike Szczys 35 Comments

[Tony Lovell] and [dkpeterborough] built a sizable camera lens using optics from a flight simulator projector. What they ended up with is a 900mm lens that can make a beautiful photo of the moon, or capture distant landscapes in great detail. The body of the lens was designed in CAD and sent off for fabrication out of aluminum, as seen above. The concentric baffles help to prevent lens flare but it can’t be used in its bare-aluminum condition. The internals were coated using a stippling finish that leaves a sandy texture. That was covered with matte black barbecue paint, doing a great job of preventing optical interference, and the outside received a glossy white coat. Finished weight: 59 pounds, but once you see the pictures you’ll agree it’s worth lugging the bulky instrument around to grab that killer shot.

[via Make]

Time-lapse Camera Dolly

November 30, 2010 by Mike Szczys 21 Comments

[Brian Grabski] was asked by a friend to design and build a dolly that would move a camera during a time-lapse sequence. Above you can see the product of his toils, and the videos after the break show off the parts that went into the design and showcase effectiveness of the build.

The dolly is designed to ride on a pair of tubular rails. These can be bent to match any desired path and the dolly will have no problem following it thanks to two features. First, the triad of skateboard wheels on each of the three corners are mounted on a swivel bearing that allows them to rotate without binding. The other piece of the puzzle is a set of drawer slides that let the third support move perpendicular to the other two sets of rollers. A motor drives a geared wheel to move the dolly along the track with speed adjustments courtesy of the motor controller. There’s also a failsafe that will shut the system down when it runs out of track, protecting that fancy piece of hardware taking the pictures.

We’ve seen timelapse equipment that moves the camera in the past, but those hacks usually involve rotating the camera along and axis. This track-based setup is a well executed tool useful at all levels of photography. We can’t wait to see the arch-based dolly that is teased at the end of the demo video.

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Timelapse Circuit For Point And Shoot Cameras

November 23, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 15 Comments

[Andyk75] has done some fantastic work documenting his timelapse addition to his digital camera. Most of the more expensive models of cameras have a remote shutter release, but the point and shoot jobs usually don’t. He decided to add the ability to turn the camera on, then shoot a picture, then turn it back off. Pretty smart, since these things tend to eat batteries pretty quickly if left on. He is using an ATtiny24 for the brains, but the circuit should be pretty adaptable to others. The final piece has several features, like the ability to change the length of time between shots and automatically shut down when it gets too dark outside to continue. He has posted the schematics as well as the board layouts if you can find them amongst the ads in instructibles. You can check out a video of a sunset taken with this camera after the break.

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Anaglyphic Photography Made Easy

November 22, 2010 by Mike Szczys 13 Comments

[ProfHankD] came up with a pretty easy way to take 3D photos using a single lens. He’s making Anaglyph images which use color filtering glasses to produce stereoscopic 3D effects. We’ve seen stereoscopic imaging hacks that use two cameras or a clever combination of mirrors, but this one uses a special filter and post-processing. [ProfHankD] drew up a template that can be used to properly align two colored filters, like those in the lens cap seen above. Once installed, just snap all the pictures you want and then hit them with your favorite photo editing software. This involves separating the color channels of the photograph and offsetting them to increase the depth of focus.

It’s a nice little process, and his writeup is easy to understand even if you’re not a hardcore photography guru.

[Thanks Paul]

Motion Activated Wildlife Camera (or A Spy Device)

November 21, 2010 by Mike Szczys 20 Comments

Now you can capture pictures of our furry friends by building a motion activated wildlife camera. [Doug Paradis] took his Air Freshener hack and used it to trigger a camera. The white dome in the picture above is the PIR sensor from an Air Wick Freshmatic, along with a cheap keychain camera and an MSP430 microcontroller. He used one of the chips that came with the TI Launchpad, a transistor, and some discreet components to interface the devices and then put them into a project box. Now he’s got a fully configurable motion-sensing camera.