Putting FD Lenses On A D60

January 11, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 15 Comments

lens

[Peter] sent in this really slick project where he ads an FD lens mount to a cannon EOS D60. He already had a collection of nice lenses and didn’t want to waste them. After finding some a donor camera for the FD mount, he purchased a cheap D60 to graft it onto. While his first impulse was to simply glue the new mount onto the front of the camera, it was evident that this would hold the lenses too far from the sensor. The camera went under a bit for a while and luckily, no real damage was done to the mirror housing. The final result seems to work very well, there are example galleries available on his site.

Removing Fisheye Distortion

December 21, 2008 by Eliot 14 Comments

fisheye

Reader [alex] had a commercial plugin for fisheye lens correction and wondered exactly what kind of magic was behind it. Was it actually doing line detection? He dropped in a square grid to see what it spit out. The warped result indicated that the transformation was completely independent of the photo’s content. Using this result as a guide he was able to create a similar transform using Warp and save it as a script. The script generates almost identical results and now he knows exactly how little magic is involved.

DS + 50D Timelapse Examples

December 19, 2008 by Eliot 3 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwKHABKL_dY]

We covered [Steve Chapman]’s Nintendo DS control for his Canon DSLR in September. He’s since improved the software so that it has a timer for sunset/sunrise amongst other things. He also shot about 30GB worth of timelapse images while in Vancouver and assembled a couple test videos. He’s still working out the processing to take full advantage of the 15megapixel images. We look forward to future results since YouTube is now using a much larger player for high def content.

High Speed Photography

December 14, 2008 by Caleb Kraft 12 Comments

high_speed

[Shakir] sent us this fairly easy way to do high speed photography. The idea is to use a microphone to detect a sharp sound on a surface and trigger the flash. The camera is set up with a long exposure to capture the action. Assuming your room is dark enough, you shouldn’t get much ghosting in your exposure. The circuit is a two stage amplifier that engages the flash using a silicon controlled rectifier. Be sure to check out the photos, some are pretty stunning.

MINI’s Augmented Reality Ad

December 13, 2008 by Eliot 12 Comments

miniaugmented

We were surprised last month when we saw augmented reality being done completely in flash. It hasn’t taken too long to go mainstream though. MINI has incorporated it into a recent German language magazine ad campaign. The fiduciary marks actually work quite well with MINI’s established ad format. Visit the ad’s URL and hold the magazine up to the webcam and a 3D model of the MINI Cabrio will appear. They have a PDF of the ad that you can print and use if you don’t have the original. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to have cross-platform support.

[via Autoblog]

Disposable Camera Nixie Tube Driver

December 12, 2008 by Caleb Kraft 10 Comments

nixie_camera

Disposable cameras are quite cheap, and include circuitry that produces very high voltages. Because of this, they have been harvested for many projects. We’ve seen them used for coil guns and large high voltage power supplies, even for fixing rechargeable batteries that won’t charge. The latest in the long list of uses is to create nixie tube drivers. [the_don125] shows us how to use a single disposable camera to power 2 to 3 medium sized Nixie tubes. Be careful, as we said before, this project deals with high voltage.

GigaPixel Panorama

December 10, 2008 by Caleb Kraft 27 Comments

gigapixel

[Ewout] sent us some info on this Automated Gigapixel Panorama Acquisition system. The system automates the process of taking the large amounts of images required to do gigapixel panoramics. You tell it key information, like what lens, and what percent overlap you want and the system will calculate how many images it will take, as well as the gigapixel count. The results are quite stunning, no visible seams with fantastic detail. Interestingly, this was created for a class in embedded system design (ECE4180) at Georgia Institute of Technology and so was our post earlier today on Digitally Assisted Billiards. Is Hack a Day part of the class curriculum? It should be.