Photography Camera hacking

Ive bought a new camera!

But more importantly for right now, my old camera didnt focus any more, so I thought I might pull it to bits to see if I could fix it.

A camera hack if you like.

Well its hacked now.

But in the process of attempting to fix it, I thought it might be grit or something stuck in the focus gears. I figured I might be able to override the emergency shutdown on lens fail, and just use brute force to get past the grit.

But before pulling it apart I thought Id look for a software hack to manually focus the thing. Its a Canon Powershot A490 point and shoot (or at least it was), so it doesnt normally have manual focus.

I found much more than a focus hack, but also much less.

Much less in that I still couldnt do manual focus, but so very much more in that I found CHDK - Canon Hack Development Kit.

CHDK is amazing. Its a kit full of files that you install onto your SD memory card, put it into your camera, then use the update firmware option (only seen on my camera when the CHDK is on the card) of your camera to install all the new functionality. It does things like...

• motion detection
• increment focus to automate focus/photo stacking as mentioned in the previous post
• depth of field calculator
• exposures from 2048s to 1/60,000s with flash sync
• change the layout and visibility of you on screen display info
• etc etc etc (so much more)

Look here to see a slightly bigger list, but still not all of it.

And here for the manual which covers more.

But even more can be found on the forum in the form of scripts that can be loaded into your camera. There are scripts that do motion detection fast enough to catch lightning strikes. (less than 60ms I think it was - dont quote me)

So in spite of just buying a new camera, Im off to see if the $20 camera I saw in the electronics shops bargain bin is a cannon powershot. 

120 Things in 20 years CHDK camera hack - Awesome. 

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Photography Photo stacking

Ive been reading a bit about photography, and discovered this thing called "photo stacking".

It helps you create super close ups that have everything in focus.


Normally in a photo, you get some bits in focus, and some out of focus.

This can be a good thing, because you dont always want, for example, the background to be sharp.

Sometimes things look better when you cant see them.

But sometimes you want to see it all.

Ill drop a series of seven photos here with each one seeing a different section in focus.

This first pic of a 300mm ruler is taken at a focal length of 10mm.

This next pic is at 20mm

You can see that the section thats in focus has moved a little further back.

This one at 50mm

 Here are three more in the series with each one seeing the focal length change through 100mm, 150mm, 200mm, and 300mm.

I would have preferred to use increments of 5mm all the way through, and take 60 photos, but this camera I have only deals with those photo lengths when used in manual focus mode. 

There is software that is free and open source, that can take the best bits of each photo, and knit them all together to make one photo. 

Apparently its possible to do this in a graphics program, but I dont have the skill set, and the software seems to work. 

There are a few different software packages, some that cost and some that are free. The one Im playing with is called, CombineZP. All you have to do is select the photos (New), then chose something that I dont understand called, "align and balance used fra..." (the title of this function is cut off because whoever made it doesnt respect my inalienable right to resize whatever window I want, and my screen size isnt the same as theirs), then click something that makes perfect sence that says GO.

After a few seconds wait, the end result is pretty good for a first attempt, and might just prove to be a very useful tool in trying to capture extreme close up shots. 

Im guessing it would be perfect if I just had a camera that could deal with letting me chose where to focus all on my own. 

Even without respecting my free will, the result is quite good. You can see in the photo below, some bands of blur where I couldnt divide the focal length and add another frame. Theres an obvious blur between the "k" and "i", and another at the "3" in 300. Another at 250, but they are all errors caused by my camera not letting me take pictures in between the ones I took. 

Tis an interesting bit of kit, and I thoroughly recommend trying it if you are taking macro shots. 

 

The result...

120 Things in 20 years - I love discovering new things like photo stacking for macro shots, and I love discovering that there are only 6 photos in my series of 7. I deleted one, and have no idea which one it was, so I moved on. 

Im also without confidence that Im using the words "focal length" properly. 

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Thinking Bacon

I thought it was just me that was a big bacon fan, but lately Ive been seeing bacon T-shirts, bacon poems, bacon coffee mugs etc everywhere I go online. Which brings me to remind myself how the net works. If I do a search on google, I see things that google thinks Im interested in. That means that if there is even the slightest connection to bacon, I get a lot of bacon hits. Everything I search for adds to the database of things Im interested in, so google thinks that even a tenuous connection is worth reporting, because Im clearly interested in bacon AND electronics.


If I do the same search on someone elses computer, I get different results.

One of the side effects of getting good search results that are relevant to the searcher, is that there is no editor to decide on the things that everyone is interested in. That tends to mean we keep a tight lid on broadening our horizons. One role of a TV news editor was to decide that say, an impending asteroid impact about to wipe us all out, was important to even people who were only normally interested in puppies and real estate. This, because it might impact their desire to buy more puppies or real estate, or might just be worth knowing about in spite of their desire to buy more puppies and real estate.

Google never includes impending asteroid impacts in search results for "haberdashery" on your grand parents computer.

A good haberdashery magazine editor might at least mention in passing thats its worth buying some extra buttons to see you through the coming asteroid induced ice age.

Im guessing magazines are a weigh point on that path, from hearing about things to only hearing about our obsessions.

The net can be an amazing way of gaining information, but it can also be a trap, set to turn us back on ourselves, and blindly confirm that which we already believe to be unconditionally true.






120 Things in 20 years is just reminding itself to wake up and smell the bacon.

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