Intervalometer!

I have been looking into the CHDK lately and what it can do that our camera can't offer on it's own.

A while ago I realised that there was no option to plug in a remote trigger to the SX40. So this meant that to trigger the camera without touching it, I would need to set it to self timer. This doesn't really help when you want to take a continuous set of images to create a lime lapse effect where you can see something moving over a long period of time.

My main goal was to create star trails. At the moment, I have about 300 images sitting on my computer that I took last night. I haven't yet composed them into one image but I'm hoping they achieve the star trails I wish to capture.

Quite often people take long exposure images for hours at a time and they get the star trails that way. However I don't really like this idea for the SX40. I had a go with it. Now granted I didn't have my settings perfect and the image was pretty over exposed, but my main worry was how hot the camera got. It was just sitting there in the garden in the evening so it wasn't sitting in direct heat and when I got it back in afterwards it was pretty heated. On top of this, the image usually takes the same amount of time to process as it does to take, so a 1 hour shot takes about 1 hour to process which obviously takes a lot of waiting time for something which may not have worked out. (It is also very annoying when your battery cuts out during the picture processing).

So in general, long exposures over many hours seem to be something best kept on SLRs in my opinion - at least I hope it's not only my camera which overheated!

There is also the option of time lapse by leaving the camera filming and then speeding up the footage in  programs like Premiere Pro or Windows Movie Maker. Whilst this does work, the camera limits the films clips to around 4GB per clip which means that you then have to sit with the camera so that you can restart the filming when it cuts out so you don't miss anything. I tried this method at Frensham Ponds about a month ago and I really liked the results, but it just wasn't practical for a long time of say, 2 and a half hours.

In addition, filming takes up a lot of memory whereas taking multiple pictures means that you can fit around 2 hours of pictures on a 2GB card, rather than having to use a 16GB card for the 1 hour of constant video footage! (These are rough amounts from my experience)

I have gone on a tangent.

My point being, I looked into the Intervalometer because it does all the hard work for you! Once you have set it up, you can leave your camera star gazing in an evening and with a well charged battery you can get around 2.5 hours worth of stars passing by and capture their movement.

A normal intervalometer would be built into a good remote trigger which would just plug into the camera and tell it to take a picture every <enter number> seconds/minutes. But as we cannot plug in a remote, we need to use CHDK in order to achieve this.

One of the Facebook page followers cleverly suggested something as simple as tying an elastic band around the shutter button so that it would continuously take pictures as long as you have the camera set to multi shot. I haven't tried it but this seems to be a good idea if you wish to avoid CHDK.

Personally I am growing to really like CHDK so I decided to go for it.

So I set up the SX40 yesterday, set the focus to infinity so it didn't bur any of the images (Infinity focus is done through the hack kit), set the shutter speed to 15 seconds and did an override of the ISO using the hack kit (however the ISO wasn't quite high enough to capture the stars). I'm going to cover all of this in a video tutorial because I am doing the one thing I hate which is talking techno mumbo jumbo without actually explaining how to achieve it.

So the camera sat in the garden taking a new picture every 30 seconds and this was the result (Try watching it full screen as the detail is small and quite dark - my bad!):

Don't be put off by that awful thumbnail... I have no idea why it shows up like that.

As you can see, I obviously had my ISO too low in the end as the stars sort of disappear however I wanted to share it to show how it came out. So I will try again tonight with slightly different settings and will make a video to show how I did it.

For those who are wondering why I would use a higher ISO instead of using a longer shutter speed, it is essentially because, the picture takes 15 seconds to take, so it needs 15 seconds to process. If the picture takes 30 seconds in total to take and process I will only just get enough pictures without getting gaps in the movement of the stars. If I did a 30 second shutter speed, it would take 1 minute in total to make the picture if we include processing time.

1 minute per picture would leave quite a big gap between the stars movements. The very first test I did of the intervalometer took one picture every 2 minutes and looked like this:

So you can see the gaps in the stars/moons movements where there were no pictures being taken. Ideally these would look like streaks and would look quite surreal.

So I now have 300 images from last night which I need to compose together so make the star trails I have been aiming for! I will update to see if it worked and I will post a tutorial on the Intervalometer and time lapse photography in the next couple of days!

Ciao for now!

Where I have disappeared to!

So I realise I have disappeared for a while now and just wanted to keep those blogger followers who are interested, up to date with what's been going on.

I have basically been studying a new animation method which has taken up a fair bunch of my time, but on another side of things, I have plans to use this new method to demonstrate the next part of my video making which is a clear example of Shutter Speed, Aperture and ISO and how they work together in photography.

Whilst many of you are already quite familiar with this now, I think it's important that those who aren't completely up to date with how the three aspects work, can now see it clearly and without all the technical mumbo jumbo that quite often gets pushed in peoples faces! I hope to achieve this with the animation I intend to make.

I am also preparing for a trip to the USA which will take me away for about 3 months. With this is in mind I hope to leave my YouTube channel at a point where people can use what is on there and avoiding as many unanswered questions as possible so we will see what I manage to get covered in the next 4 weeks before I go.

I'm really looking forward to the trip and I will try to keep posting pictures here and on my Facebook page as I go so that you can see what sort of places I am discovering and what sort of photography I capture along the way.

I also plan to do some quick tip sheets that you can print out and use to troubleshoot if you are in the middle of photographing something and you can't figure out your settings.

On a completely different note, to anyone who is interested in this news, I recently found out that Glen Keane, one of the most talented and down to earth animators I have seen in action (not in real life unfortunately but on video), has taken the decision to retire from Disney.

Whilst some may not care about this information, I find Glen Keane a real inspiration to work from and his passion in his work and the way that we completely embodies the characters he works on is fascinating. He surely will be missed from the animation community but I hope he enjoys his deckchair and beer in the garden!

So anywho, there is the quick run through where I have been and what I really hope to achieve/create in the next 4 weeks before I go.

FD :)

Editing Levels in Photoshop

I have just put on a quick video on how to use the Levels tool in Photoshop.

Levelling is great for editing things like colour, shadow and highlights and it is done very quickly. Sometimes when I am editing I feel like I have overdone it when I compare it to the original, but then I sit back and think about how it would look if I hadn't seen the original and I always feel happy with the result.

If you have access to Photoshop, it's a great tool to use and experiment with as each picture is fun to edit and the boost colours etc :)

Here's some before and after shots:

HDR Photography

I am just exporting a tutorial for HDR Photography.

If you are interested in doing this with the SX40, you will need to have the CHDK installed on your memory card in order to use RAW files. You can see how to do this Here, remember that this method requires a memory card that is 4GB or less in size.

Here is today's example of the HDR image I made for the tutorial:

AEB (Auto Exposure Bracketing)

I know I mentioned this yesterday but I just want to run through Auto Exposure Bracketing pre-HDR (High Dynamic Range Photography).

When we move onto HDR things get quite complicated with the SX40 so I want to just run through the reasons for exposure bracketing first.

The idea of exposure bracketing is that you can guarantee that you get the right exposure for your image, especially if you don't have the time to keep reviewing back through your photos.

Exposure is essentially how bright your images are coming out. Over exposed images are often too bright and too much light is affecting the image. Vice Versa, under exposed images are too dark and not enough detail can be seen.

Imagine you are at an event, you have your images set up perfectly so you start snapping away. However, as the light changes and as you move indoors and outdoors, that lighting is going to change, and if you don't keep an eye on your settings, some of your pictures are going to come out too dark or too light because you haven't been paying attention to the light changing around you.

However at events, we don't have time to sit there reviewing every picture we take. The same with taking pictures of family gatherings or pets or when we are going around on a tour of a building, there's not always time to check our pictures came out OK. With bracketing, we can tell the camera to automatically take three pictures every time we take a shot. This means that, if our original settings come out badly, we have one picture that is brighter and one picture that is darker, and if we did have a moment where our original settings weren't right, likeliness is that one of the other pictures came out OK instead.

Obviously, you will need to take into consideration that you will now have 3x the amount of pictures to look through and also 3x less space on our memory card so really this isn't ideal to use every day, all the time. But it certainly helps when we are photographing something important.


So just to show you, these three pictures were taken with bracketing this morning...



Original:

Under Exposed:

Over Exposed:

So you can imagine, had the sun gone in, and I was still using these settings, the over exposed image would have come out bright enough and the original may have been a little bit too dark. The under exposed would have been way too dark but at least by have bracketing switched on, the over exposed image would have redeemed the bad settings on the original.

Frensham Ponds and Time Lapse!

Hi All,

I took a trip to a place called Frensham Ponds which is in Farnham in Surrey. It's a really nice place to go and take photos as they have sail boats and little beaches and a few little walking paths to stroll along. So originally I was going to take some photos with bracketing as this is my next YouTube tutorial. However, as I sat there in the sun which  haven't seen in a long while (not properly anyway), I decided to leave the camera running on a video with my 16GB card and did a time lapse by speeding up the footage in Window Movie Maker.

The results can be seen here:

Vid1

And here:

Vid2


I hope to do another one of these at a sunset if I can. The great thing is that you can just leave it running, no other efforts needed :) I had to cut the first video together as the vid cut out at around 17 mins. The video as a whole is around 35 mins long, compressed into about 34 seconds. It's cool to watch the clouds moving I think :)

So of course I also went to take some photos and got some pretty funky results! I accidentally stumbled across a couple more Bokeh rules/ideas for those who are interested:

1 - If you take something with Macro focus this often gives you a Bokeh effect so you don't always have to be far back if you are right up against your subject.

2 - Think about some kind of foreground Bokeh instead. You still need a big gap between you and your subject, but this time make sure there is something a lot closer to you than your subject. This will majorly blur in the foreground as the camera can't focus on it because it will be too close and it will look like a foreground Bokeh.


As an example, here are some foreground Bokeh style pics I took today:

And here's the Macro focus version of Bokeh:

So off of the subject of Bokeh before I bore everyone, here's some other pics I took on my jolly old walk through Frensham :)

Understanding Shutter Speed...

So here's the next downloadable help-sheet. I hope it helps and don't be afraid to send your opinions this way whether they be good or bad ;)

There is a link to the file on my Deviant art Here