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I hope you enjoy this repository of my various projects and ideas. Thanks for looking, Joe.



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Photography

Sunday
Jul172011

Sunset & Flower Timelapses

Not the best sunset to do a timelapse of, but it still has some interesting elements. I probably should have used a shorter shutter interval to smooth out the video.

 

This is a timelapse of some really cool flowers at my parents' house; they bloom when the sun goes down. I also should have used a faster timing interval here since the flowers actually bloom fairly quickly once they get started. 

Tuesday
Sep072010

Night Sky Timelapse

I wanted to try this type of timelapse video since I first built my Arduino Intervalometer. Luckily the weather was clear enough that I had a good opportunity for night photography. I set my camera to take 30 second exposures at F8 and set the intervalometer to trigger it once a minute for 2 hours.

Using the Picasa movie creator mode, I set the transition to timelapse and the frame length to 1/24 of a second. This resulted in a nice smooth video of the northern sky rotating around the north star. Note: the video looks much better in full screen HD.

Saturday
Feb062010

Timelapse Using Arduino Intervalometer

I finally got around to using my Arduino Intervalometer to make a timelapse video. With a big snowstorm coming I decided to use it to my advantage. I set my camera in Aperture Priority mode at F5 and had the intervalometer trigger it every 5 minutes for 3 hours.

In order to turn the photos into video I used Picasa, which has a great movie creation feature. The movie creator has a timelapse mode that allows you to set how fast you want the frames to last. I went with 1/8 of a second per frame since it makes the video fairly smooth while not blowing through the frames too fast. If I wanted to I could have reduced my timing interval by a third and made a video at the normal 24 frames per second for smoother video.

Friday
Jan012010

Custom Bokeh

Some time ago I saw this project, which shows how you can make your own custom bokeh effect simply by placing a cardboard sleeve over a DSLR's lens. In the time off I had over the holidays I decided to try this technique myself. This is ridiculously simple to do and produces some pretty cool results.

All you need to create this effect is a lens with a wide enough aperature to create fairly shallow depth of field (the wider the better). I used my Canon 50mm F1.4 lens. For the sleeve I used some cardstock I had laying around, some tape, and a razor blade to cut out the tree shape. 

The photos below show the difference between a picture taken with the cardboard sleeve on and off. I used a Christmas tree in the background to create the small points of light necessary for this effect. Due to the relatively low light necessary for this type of photography a tripod may also be necessary, although these photos were taken hand-held.

 

Saturday
Nov142009

GIMP HDR Photos

A while back I ran across this Instructable, which details how to make High Dynamic Range photos using the GIMP photo editing program.

The steps are as follows:

  • Open the base image as the Background for the composite image
  • Dark Layer
    • Open the dark stock image
    • Copy & paste it into a new layer in the composite image
    • Rename the layer Dark
    • Desaturate the original dark stock image
    • Adjust the levels of the dark stock image
    • Create a layer mask for the Dark layer
    • Copy the desaturated dark stock image
    • Paste it into the Dark layer's mask and anchor
  • Light Layer
    • Open the light stock image   
    • Copy & paste it into a new layer in the composite image
    • Rename the layer Light
    • Desaturate the original light stock image
    • Invert the colors of the desaturated light stock image
    • Adjust the levels of the light stock image
    • Create a layer mask for the Light layer
    • Copy the desaturated & inverted light stock image
    • Paste it into the Light layer's mask and anchor
  • Save the finished composite image

Below from left to right are the base image, the darker and lighter photo used and the HDR photo I made using this method:

               

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is a fun technique to play around with. Some photos, if taken properly in the right conditions, can gain a whole new dimension when they get a little HDR boost.