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.

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.

Canon 40D Hacked To Record Movies

September 23, 2008 by Joey Celis 29 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlKywUVFJW4]

Both Canon and Nikon recently released DSLR cameras that now include a feature that most consumer level digital cameras have had for sometime: the ability to record movies. What makes movie recording especially appealing on a DSLR is the wide selection of lenses available to get the look you’re after. If you’re an owner of Canon’s 40D you may want to follow [DataGhost]’s progress on the CHDK forum as he is currently working on bringing this function to the 40D.

While [DataGhost] has a working proof of concept he notes that there are still some issues pertaining to the camera powering down while recording a video, autofocusing, and writing to the memory card. Aside from this, [DataGhost] has made considerable progress and is considering adding custom user settings via the mode dial to really give some creative control. We’re excited about this hack and can’t wait for its release to the general public.

[via CHDK forum]

Control Your Camera Remotely With A DS

September 17, 2008 by Joey Celis 9 Comments

Using a custom built cable connected to the lower GBA slot and a copy of Canon’s SDK, [Steve Chapman] has come up with a very clever way of taking pictures remotely with a Nintendo DS Lite.

Currently the software supports bracket shooting as well as bulb mode. [Steve] points out that he is currently testing an audio based trigger system using the mic built into the DS and the software is still a work in progress.

While the weight saving benefits of using a DS instead of a notebook are obvious, there are things you do give up going this route. Traditionally, when you tether a camera to a computer the photos are saved directly to the computer where you can view the image on a much larger monitor. With the DS, it seems all you can do is remotely trigger the camera. Given the size and resolution of the screens maybe that’s all it can do.

[via Boing Boing Gadgets]

Intervalometers And Timelapse Photography

July 9, 2008 by Caleb Kraft 6 Comments

Time lapse photography can seem out of reach for many of us who don’t have fancy cameras(or a hacked cannon point and shoot). We recently covered using a TI-83 as a timer, and now we’ve gathered a collection of DIY intervalometers to help you get clicking.

Up first, for those of you who don’t want to dismantle your camera, here are some mechanical ones that will work on any camera.

[Simplesimon] has done a fantastic job with this integrated system pictured above. He’s added an adjustable solenoid to click the shutter release. By including a second kit board to handle an RF remote, it has remote single shot capabilities too!

Continue reading “Intervalometers And Timelapse Photography” →

Camera Lightning Capture

June 11, 2008 by Eliot 6 Comments

The people at [Hobby Robotics] decided to build a trigger circuit for lightning photography. There are more complex ways to do this, but they just used a photo transistor and an Arduino. The Arduino watches the photo transistor’s value and compares it to the previously captured one. If the difference is above a certain threshold, it means a rapid change in the amount of light has occurred, which triggers the shutter. An earlier post covered how to directly control the Canon 30d using an Arduino. All of this works because the shutter lag and code execution together are less than lighting’s 100ms duration.

TI-83 Intervalometer

June 9, 2008 by Eliot 12 Comments

The headline How to Make Time Lapse Video With Your DSLR didn’t really grab us. Honestly, you pay that much for a camera and it can’t do time lapse out of the box? Well, we nearly missed the real story: [Chris Martino] was using a TI-83 to act as the intervalometer for the camera. The calculator has a 2.5mm audio jack for it’s data port and the camera has an identical port for the shutter trigger. The TI-83 runs a program with a FOR loop to act as the timer. When the loop completes it sends data to the port, and the voltage triggers the shutter. The rate isn’t very exact and varies depending on the charge left in the batteries. [Chris] estimated 10000 program iterations ends up being about 26 seconds between pictures. This technique has been tested on 84, 86, and 89 series calculators too. There are a couple example time lapse videos embedded after the break.