Tag: photography

Camera board project: time lapse video

Our friends at DesignSpark have produced a really beautiful time-lapse video with one of our new camera boards. It doesn’t start very beautifully, because it was filmed on a day whose start can best be described as “sodden”, but by afternoon the clouds parted and England started to look exceptionally green and pleasant. If you want to skip the rain, fast-forward to 1m46. (There’s a guest appearance from a double rainbow later on, too.)

You can find detailed instructions on how to make your own time-lapse video with your own camera board over at DesignSpark. Big thanks to Andrew Back for the vid and the tutorial!

Gigapi: a Raspberry Pi rig for gigapixel photography

We’ve seen a number of photographers who have taken to the Pi as a way to bring down the cost of the sort of kit that was, pre-Pi, outside the budgets of mere mortals. Case in point: gigapixel photography. A gigapixel image is made up of (at least) a billion pixels, which means you’ve now got access to the sort of fine and vivid detail on your monitor that we mere humans with our shonky eyeballs could only dream of until recently.

At the moment, a camera that can take a gigapixel image all in one shot is the sort of fantasy hardware that the military is pouring millions into. But if you’re not in charge of a defence silo, you can still take your own gigapixel images by stitching together many megapixel-sized images from an SLR camera on a motorised mount into a giant, seamless mosaic with very fine detail. You’ll need something approaching a defence budget if you’re going to do this yourself without building your own hardware, though; I spent a few seconds googling and found that off-the-shelf motorised rigs for your camera can cost nearly $1000.

Tim and Jack Stocker thought this was daft, so they built their own out of MDF, some Lego turntables, and a Pi with a cheap stepper motor attached.

Gigapi in use. (We love the yellow paint job – it’s a beautifully made piece of kit.) Click to enlarge.

This is the instrument box Tim is holding in the photo above, opened so you can peer inside. Click to enlarge.

The Pi has a lot of computation to do here: Jack’s software (which you can download on GitHub) works out the horizontal and vertical angles required, the camera sensor size, the length of zoom used and the image overlap required to stitch everything together into a tidy mosaic later on. It figures out how many photos are needed to complete the picture, when the stepper motors should be moved, and by how much and in what order; and when and for how long the shutter should be opened – it also deals with the focus.

You’ll find a long description of how to reproduce the Stockers’ setup, with a parts list, enough information for you to make your own shutter control circuit and more at GigaPi.

For obvious reasons, I can’t host a sample gigapixel image here. But you can find some pictures taken with the Stockers’ rig, one of which is a simply ridiculous 15.2 gigapixels (and enormous fun; it’s full of Easter eggs, and the detail’s so good that you can count how many peanuts are left in the bird feeder) at gigapan.com.

Bonus fact of the day: Sophie Wilson, of ARM and BBC Micro fame, is also a gigapixel photographer, and she’s created some really beautiful pictures using the technique – the architectural photos are my favourites. She occasionally gives talks in and around Cambridge on the subject, minus the Raspberry Pi (I spotted an advert for one in my local post office last week). Keep an eye out if you’re in town.

 

Bird photography with a Raspberry Pi and a DSLR

Tricky things, birds. Even when you’ve got yourself sorted out with boxes and feeders to entice them into your garden, it can be very difficult to get a decent photograph – they don’t stay still for long, especially if they see you coming (and it is amazing just how adept birds are at spotting the slightest movement – the sort of movement you might make to operate the zoom lens on your camera, for example), and many feeding birds will only visit the table for a few seconds at a time, even if you’re well hidden.

Enter Adrian Bevan and his Raspberry Pi.

Adrian had built a shutter release for his Canon1000D SLR, and decided to extend his new knowledge by making a DIY remote release. He’s been activating it manually, but has also made instructions available for using it with a motion detector (Adrian’s currently using a webcam and a second Pi for this part of the kit), so that the SLR can fire automatically when the Pi it is attached to senses that there was a bird on the table using information streamed from the outdoor Pi.

Your best bet here is to set the camera up in continuous shooting mode so that it’ll take several shots over a few seconds once your target has been spotted. Adrian has put exhaustive instructions on making your own setup on his blog, complete with circuit diagrams and code, alongside some video of the shutter in action.

Speaking of birds, I was, sadly, nowhere near a camera when a sparrowhawk dropped out of the sky to disembowel a blue tit on my front lawn this morning. Rotten shame, that. Oh – and if anybody has any tips on how to stop my bird-feeders being reliably emptied within ten minutes of filling by a horde of marauding starlings, I’m all ears.

Adrian has used that old Pi hackers’ standby, Tupperware, to house the webcam, battery pack and associated Pi in a waterproof environment. Securely housing your DSLR outside in a way that means it won’t get wet but can still take pictures is, obviously, a bit trickier; his is, I think, set up indoors, pointing out of a window, with a whacking great zoom lens attached to the front. If you’ve any ideas on how to set up and leave a good camera outdoors without it getting wet or stolen, please let us know in the comments!

 

 

 

 

 

Time lapse video, for art and for science

Dave Hunt (a familiar name in these parts) has been working on perfecting his Raspberry Pi-controlled camera time lapse rig. Before I go into any more detail, here’s some absolutely stupendous video resulting from his work on the setup. (I recommend you use HD when viewing this – and watch the video in a full-screen setting if you can.)

We’ve featured a few projects here which use the Pi to create time-lapse video, but Dave’s is the most sophisticated we’ve seen yet, adding features like a heater to evaporate dew from the lens and an ability to film rising or falling sequences. There are some great pictures documenting the build at his blog (we’re very impressed by the neatness of the construction work), along with some circuit diagrams and the Python you’ll need to create your own rig. Visit Dave’s site for a tutorial and discussion about construction.

We’re very encouraged to see so many artists using the Pi, in so many different ways; there have been a number of art installations featured here, and it’s really great to see the Pi driving the tools needed to create beautiful things. Computing is as much a creative discipline as it is a scientific one – that’s a message we at the Foundation are very keen to get through to kids, but it’s not one we’re seeing reflected in schools.

Science can be beautiful too, though. Over in the United States, SaratogaWeather has been using a static camera controlled by a Pi to take time-lapse video of the weather patterns over Mount Timpanogos, Utah. Dynamic systems like the formation of clouds are hard to appreciate and study at real-time speeds: but speed things up a bit, and patterns and structures become evident and much easier to analyse.

There’s a whole channel full of these videos, and cloud geeks like me will have great fun with them. I irritated everyone around by shouting “CAP AND BANNER!” at the top of my voice when I spotted one in another of these videos. (Once I nearly made Eben crash the car by screaming “Stop! KELVIN HELMHOLTZ!” while we were travelling at speed down the A14. I blame hanging out with fluid dynamicists. Kelvin Helmholtz instability produces a great and rather rare cloud formation, though – I’m still proud to have spotted one.)

What applications would you like to see time-lapse cameras being used for? Are you working on something yourself? We’d love to hear your thoughts.

Focus-stacking with Raspberry Pi for macro photography

Dave Hunt is on a bit of a roll at the moment. Not content with having engineered the water droplet photography setup behind the prettiest post we’ve featured here, he’s also been working with the Pi and an home-made macro rail for sharper macro photographs without all that woolly depth of field. Bokeh – the fuzzy blur from the out-of-focus parts of a picture – is an effect that can be really beautiful, but sometimes you want a sharper picture, which can be nigh-on impossible in macro photography without special equipment.

Dougal, this cow is small. Those ones are far away.

There’s a way professional photographers deal with this, but, of course, it’s expensive. You can buy a rig which allows you to take many images, each taken a little closer to the object, so different parts of it are in focus with each picture. You can then combine or stack all those images in software, as in the cow picture on the right. There’s an open software solution to the matching and stacking problem called CombineZ (somebody port this thing to the Pi; that GPU is built for just this sort of application), but if you want to buy a rail that automates the moving of your camera, things suddenly start to look expensive. Dave says commercial solutions come in at around $600.

Enter the $35 Raspberry Pi and an old flat-bed scanner from the loft.

If you want to build your own focus-stacking rail, Dave has full build instructions, including circuit diagrams, code and tips on where to get parts at his website; even if you’re not a seasoned electronics hacker, you should be able to follow his very clear instructions if you want to make your own. Thank you Dave, for another great money-saving photography project and a fantastic writeup. We like your cow.

Water droplet photography

We knew when we were designing it that the Pi would make a great bit of digital/real-world meccano. We hoped we’d see a lot of projects we hadn’t considered ourselves being made with it. We’re never so surprised by what people do with it as we are by some of the photography projects we see.

Using a €15 solenoid valve, some Python and a Raspberry Pi to trigger the valve and the camera shutter at the same time, Dave has built a rig for taking water droplet photographs.

Click the image to visit Dave’s site for instructions.

I remember the first time I saw droplet photographs as a little girl back in the early 80s,  in one of my grandma’s National Geographic Magazines. Back then, this sort of technique was completely out of the reach of the amateur photographer. Now, it’s actually very cheap to set up yourself, and surprisingly simple.

Dave has documented everything he did to make the setup; it’s very approachable, and even if you’re a photographer with little electronics experience, you should be able to make your own. Visit Dave’s site for full and easy-to-follow instructions – and let us know how you got on!

 

RasPiLapse

If you go shopping for a time lapse dolly rig for your camera, you’re going to be in for a hefty sum of money. So Rick Adam has put together a website showing you how to construct your own - taking you through software, hardware, construction and all that good stuff. You’ll be using a Raspberry Pi, a motor and timing belt (Rick’s were from eBay), and some bits and pieces from the DIY store. He reckons the whole rig will cost you less than a tenth of what a professional rig might, with results just as good as the pro version. I had a chat with him on Twitter about it. He said: “It’s a first draft, but it works all the same!” And boy, does it. Here’s some video of the setup working – and of its gorgeous output.