Flip cameras are fun and easy to use, but not particularly versatile. If you've had poor results at macrophotography with a Flip, you might be interested in these DIY lenses. One is macroscopic lens for taking photos and video of small things, and the other is a microscope for even smaller things.
To construct the macro lens, you'll need a pair of binoculars, some rubber bands and paper clips. Simply remove the lenses from the front of the binoculars, complete with the plastic casings that hold them. Thread a rubber band folded in half to the plastic casing and hold it in place with small segments from the paper clip. Now place the lens in front of the Flip's lens and secure the rubber band around the flip.
The microscope's eyepiece uses no such attachment method, simply hold it in front of the Flip. The same process can't be used here because getting the proper focus requires it to be held at varying distances from the camera, not flush against it like the macro lens. In any case, it's any easy mod that should have you taking pictures of bugs and other tiny things in no time. Look after the break for video of the lenses in action.
Hack-A-Day friend [Nathan] showed us some of his results creating his own High Dynamic Range images. Three normal Low Dynamic Range photos. One is under exposed, one is normal and the third is over exposed to capture the information needed. Then all three are used to create a single HDR image. Technically, the HDR image contains too much information to properly display, but even this limited version looks damn impressive.
You'll need a tripod, a camera that allows you to adjust your exposure value and a decent CPU to do the processing. (This pic took a couple of minutes to render on a quad core cpu) You can check out the full HDR photo here and one of the original frames here. For the software side, you can use pfstools on the command line or QtpfsGUI for the graphics side - both are free and open source. [Nathan] suggests a camera with bracket mode and a remote shutter release for best results. If you're all about theory, you can grab a white paper on the process here.
We just ordered up a new ATC3K video camera from Oregon Scientific for some, uh projects. (No, not our new porn site.) If you've got one of the older ATC2K cams, you can mod it a bit to avoid dropping another C-note on the new model. [Carlos] wrote up his mod to remove and replace the original narrow lens with a wide angle fisheye lens. The install requires some significant effort and some case modding - probably not a good idea if the waterproof feature is dear to you.
Droplet photography (link translated from French) often produces simple and beautiful images, but timing the exposure can be tricky. Snapping the photo too early or too late can cause you to miss the action, which only lasts a fraction of a second. EquinoxeFR (the people behind the Asus WL500GP audio hack) came up with a solution to this problem using a circuit with an ATmega168 running an Arduino environment. The circuit controls a syringe that contains a liquid and is triggered remotely to release a drop into a darkened chamber. A camera with the shutter open is attached to the chamber, and before the droplet hits, it crosses an IR sensor that triggers the flash to go off a few milliseconds later, capturing the unique crown shape of the impact. No schematic is available as yet, but comments at the bottom of the post suggest one will be coming soon.
This particular unit has been de-commissioned since 2005, but it's still interesting. JACARA set up a webcam on Antarctica. They used an off the shelf Axis NetEye200 camera, mounted it inside a pair of hemispherical plastic domes along with a small electric heater and thermostat to keep the device from freezing.
[Wallace] sent in this awesome project built by [Julius Von Bismarck]. The "Image Fulgurator" is the result of mating an optical slave flash with a camera body turned projector. The result is the ability to project ghost images onto a picture being taken by anyone using a camera with their flash. Check out the demo video after the break or hit the project site for more.
We've seen plenty of lens hacks, but [Koray] took things in a new direction. Rather than buy lens chips for modding all of his manual lenses, he added a lens chip inside his Digital Rebel 300D (aka XT). Most of us might cringe at gutting their Rebel, but he performed this bit of soldering surgery on a unit he picked up for £40 and repaired. Excellent work!
Update: yeah yeah, the 300D is the original Digital Rebel.
This fantastically huge housing was put together by [Ed Sauer]. He put it together using TIG welded 6061 aluminum for the body and machined the port mount out of 7075 aluminum. The lens port is a commercial unit from a housing manufacturer along with a few manual controls. He wrote up the build in this pdf.
Underwater camera housings work great - but they are prone to humidity, dirt and dust problems if you open them more often than needed. In order to download the images off of his digital camera between dives, [Matt] decided to add a waterproof external USB port to his housing. He had an extra 5 pin strobe bulkhead installed by Ikelite (makers of excellent housings). Then he spliced on a mini-usb cable for the camera and spliced a standard USB end onto a strobe cable. During dives, the port is closed with an o-ring sealed cap.
The idea of using servos to aim a telescope isn't new, but [John]'s build looks so much like a prop from Johnny Mnemomic that we can't resist posting it. The goal isn't so much remote control as it is usability. He added a webcam and a pair of servos to help him fine focus and adjust the elevation of the scope to minimize vibration during those sensitive operations.
To make this work, install Motion on a system running Linux. As its name suggests, Motion is a free motion-detecting application that monitors movement in a webcam's field of view. Once installed, it should be configured to take a snapshot of the event whenever something moves; with the locate option turned on, it draws a square frame around the area where motion occurred. The program includes http server functionality, so the photos can be viewed from a remote location. When all of that is properly configured, motion can be set to trigger cURL, Wget, or [Goel]'s Perl script to post a message to Twitter about the event. From there the Twitter account can be configured to send text messages to a phone, creating a virtually instant notification of motion sensed by the webcam.
[Marc] sent in this awesome insect photography rig. The camera is manually pre-focused and set for a 30 second exposure at ISO100. The aluminum cylinder in front of the lens is an external shutter mounted with a custom turned lens adapter. It's used because the built in shutter is too slow for insect capture. The camera/shutter is triggered by a pair of lasers with photo detectors. When both beams are broken, the insect should be in front of the lens. A Garmin GPS provides position information that's tagged on the image by the Nikon D200. A large photo of the rig is here, while a more detailed writeup on building it is here.
Update: It looks like we covered a previous version of this rig, but the old links are down and we didn't have a shot of the setup. Oh, and I forgot to mention [Marc] new control box for running this rig.
This is some beautiful work. The clip features multiple video streams stabilized and then assembled into a whole. First, [ibftp] used the "Stabilize" feature in Motion 3 (part of Apple's Final Cut Studio 2) to remove the camera shake from the clips. Then he was able to blend the videos with "fusion" set to "multiplication". If you've got access to the tools, this shouldn't be too hard to do yourself. We're certain someone in SIGGRAPH is already attempting to do the same thing live. If you want to see image stabilization really making a difference, have a look at the stabilized version of the Zapruder film embedded below.
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.
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.
