Tshani Village kids – Transkei, South Africa

This image was taken with a Canon DCS 520/EOS D2000. This bad boy, a 1.7kg beast of a DSLR, is a 2 megapixel behemoth and when first sold in 1998 cost 1,980,000 yen. That’s north of ! I picked it up for next to nothing a year or two ago.

I processed this “polaroid” with Toycamera Analogcolor. Images straight out of the camera are quite soft around the edges so I don’t mind degrading the quality a little.

Second Arduino intervalometer test

Moon setting over Zugersee on 22 March 2010. I was up at 5.30am this morning for this. Thats rather early  for me. Having learnt that the moon was at its largest it will be for 20 years, I wanted to try to see how I could get along with some further testing of my arduino intervalometer.

Intervalometer: homemade, exposure compensating/bulb ramping arduino intervalometer.
Processed in Adobe Aftereffects
No deflicker applied.
Camera: Taken with Canon 50d.
Lens: Sigma 10-20mm 1:4-5.6 DC HSM
Aperture: F7.0
Focal length: 10mm
Taken over a period of 1hr15 (5:45am to 7:00am)
Longest exposure: 20 sec
Shortest exposre 1/125 sec

I went back to sleep so am not sure that this went exactly according to plan..

I have a few ideas for some variations (updating the arduino script). Watch this space.

Albis Hochwacht – Wildnispark Zurich

Spring has definitely arrived in Zurich! A week ago I went for a ride along the Albis and decided to climb the Hochwacht tower. These are a few images from my ride and from the top of the tower. Click on the images below to enlarge them. These images

Do a good thing by helping a friend out. Support Tim

My friend Tim, cofounder of  the non-profit organisation’ Take 3 – A Clean beach initiative’, needs your help in making the oceans a better place for marine life. Learn more by clicking through.

Xhosa homestead – Transkei, South Africa

This is one of my favourite images from 2009. This was taken in the Transkei, Eastern Cape, South Africa. It is a picture of a tradition Xhosa homestead, made from mud bricks and grass. I was driving along the road with some friends when I saw these three huts with the warm afternoon light catching them ahead of an angry sky. I ran back a few hundred meter to frame this image with my telephoto lens.

Getting ready for powpow…

I may have posted this image before? I’m not sure whether I have? This is Scott Heale, currently ranked 2nd on the Freeride World Qualifying Tour (Go Scotty!), dropping a cliff in Temple Basin a few months ago. I’m excited about the prospect of being on the mountain in 2 days time so I thought I would post something!

Pass at your own risk

Kruger Park, October 2010

I’m looking at you!

This is one of my favourite moments from 2010. This was taken just meters off the road from Skukuza to Lower Sabie. It took my father and I a while to notice that there was a half eaten impala only meters away in the bough of the tree.

A DIY splitboard with inside edges

Earlier this year I spent quite an extended period visiting my family in New Zealand over the winter. It was nice to get away for a while, get a some perspective on a few things and to share a lot of time with so many members of my immediate and extended family.

This isn’t a post about my family though, it’s a post about snowboarding and more specifically, DIY splitboards with inside edges! Whilst in NZ for the winter, I couldn’t really pass up on the opportunity to get some snowboarding in, and I headed down to Christchurch and then made a trip out to Temple Basin and Broken River. I was keen to experience the NZ club fields, and get in a few tours between clubs in the Craigieburn range. Before setting out, I figured that if I was going to be doing some touring, I would need a splitboard. With my factory production S-series sitting somewhere in storage in Kashmir, I decided that, given the time at my disposal, the access to tools in my father’s garage, and my penchant for figuring things out, I decided to split an old 165 Option Freeplus. I’ve written about this board before. I liked it for a wee while, before it started to delam, after perhaps 15 riding days on it. I got really bad after-sales service from the Swiss agents for Option and I ended up putting this puppy to sleep prematurely.

(Gallery below)

Now, considering splitting a board, I figured it would be a perfect candidate as whilst I was putting in inside edges on my new splitboard, I figured it wouldn’t be a problem to replaced some of the outside edge and base material of my old board and sort out the delam issue. There are some great write-ups out there on other’s experience of splitting a board, most of them in the forum at splitboard.com and I would suggest anyone looking to split there own board take a look there before starting.

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Kappel am Albis

Antony and Rebecca’s new house in Kappel am Albis, Switzerland

Yanik slaying the shark.. taken almost 2 years ago

Bulb ramping arduino intervalometer for Time lapse photography – theory, build and early experimentation.

My interest in photography has drawn me into a new world that has reignited interests in electronics and programming which I haven’t explored in decades. A number of months ago I saw some amazing time lapse videos on Vimeo and I spent quite a bit of time trying to figure them out. This has been a really interesting journey which I’ve decided to share.

If you want to learn more, I would highly recommend you check out the Timescape.org forum. I would definitely say it is the one single place where most of the heavy hitters hang out and are very willing to share their techniques. I wont take all the fun out of it and tell you all the gory details. Those can mostly be found on Timescapes and a few other sites I’ll tell you about later.

What sets so many of these time lapse sequences apart for me is the introduction of motion, the level of detail achieved through the use of DSLRs, and lastly the smooth transition from day to night or vice versa. Being able to do this turns out to be quite a technical feat, and it is very much these technical challenges that have interested me.

Briefly I’ll touch on the way these are achieved. The detail is out there on the interwebs, so I’ll leave you to find it all.

Firstly, by using DSLRs over a video camera, you are able to achieve a number of advantages, some rather insignificant, whilst other are game changers. In the same way the Canon 5D Mk II with its large sensor, exceptional low light performance and wide range of relatively affordable glass has changed independent video making, using a DSLR for time lapse brings similar advantages including very narrow depth of field (if you require). There are also other advantages specific to time lapse video. The large sensor of a DSLR has more than enough resolution to shoot HD. In fact you are able to shoot 4K video if you use the entire sensor, or alternatively you can use a small crop of the sensor and still achieve full HD video. This allows you to add pan and zoom in post production, without dropping below full HD quality. This is one of the ways in which one can give an impression of motion during post production. Another advantage is the ability to shoot in Raw and this gives you greater latitude in post production (Similar to the Red Video Cameras).

A better way to achieve motion control in time lapse is the use a dolly system which moves between exposures. There is a community of time lapse photographers out there currently making there own, and recently the fruit of much of this labour has resulted in the launch of a very affordable system from Dynamic Perception. This is built by the same guys that run an open source motion control project called OpenMoco, and you will find them on the timescapes forum too.

The last aspect of these time lapse videos that has really impressed me, has been the smooth transition of exposure from day to night and vice versa. This turns out to be quite difficult to resolve. The dynamic range typical of sunset and sunrise scenes is quite massive, and the change in exposure required to smoothly capture these transitions is also very large. Some folk have dealt with the dynamic range issue by shooting HDR timelape which I personally am not a fan of for the same reason that I am not a fan of most HDR out there: It is usually far to saturated with too much localised contrast. I prefer HDR photography which doesn’t look like HDR. I am digressing. There are many real difficulties associated with the smooth transition from day to night and amongst the time lapse photographers, getting this right is seen as the holy grail. At first one might think that you can achieve this by simply leaving your camera on aperture or shutter speed priority and, after dialing in the over or underexposure you desire, let it calculate the exposure automatically. This is what you would do if you are taking a still photo, but unfortunately it doesn’t work so well with time lapse photography. Typically the best DSLR will change exposures by a minimum of one third of a stop. As a result, when you then create a video, there are distinct jumps from one exposure level to next as the metered exposure results in a change in the exposure value. This introduces dreaded flicker into your time lapse video. Although in post production you can make two still images shot at 1/3 of a stop apart look almost the same, when you have 30 frames in each second of footage, there is a great deal of post production that is required to get rid of this flicker. There are some software solutions to that resolve this problem, the best I’ve tried is the trial version of GBdeflicker for Adobe Aftereffects.

Another workflow which I haven’t personally tried, involved shooting on manual settings and monitoring the historgram. As soon as the exposure level moves enough that you are loosing shadow details or highlights that you wish to maintain, you then adjust your exposure value accordingly and then in post production you fade these sequences into each other.

The solution I’ve most experimented with, and which has prompted me to write this post, involves using an intervalometer that ramps the shutter speed according to the ambient lighting conditions. Tom on timescapes has prototyped such a device which he calls the Little Bramper. He is currently making his second batch. I’ve got my name down to receive one of these when they are ready, but its been a rather frustrating wait. It has been so frustrating that I eventually decided to build somehting of my own. Chris Church (aka roaming drone), who is the same man, along with Jay Burlage, behind Dynamic Perceptions and Openmoco, built a system based on the TAOS TSL230R Light to frequency IC and the Arduino Microprocessor. A little while ago I decided to embark on a project to build this same system, and recently built a second one which included a few of my own changes to the software.

Having never studied electronics, and only having limited programming experience, I found this quite a challenge, which I have really enjoyed a great deal. My soldering skills have improved 1000 fold and I’ve learnt a lot. With a rather limited foundation of knowledge troubleshooting proved very challenging, but ultimately achieving some success has been very rewarding.

Chris’s original blog post as well as a few similar Arduino based bulb-ramping intervalometers proved invaluable in being able to put this little puppy together. I hope in time this functionality will be added to the firmware of current cameras or released in future models, or alternatively consumer products that are able to achieve the same results are released. I’m a bit of a tinkerer, so I am happy to cobble together my own.

Another method worth mentioning, involves aperture ramping. By using a motor to drive the aperture ring on a suitable modified manual lens, you are able to change the exposure level smoothly over time as the lighting conditions change. This has the effect of being able to maintain the same shutter speed so motion doesn’t speed up or slow down as the shutter speed decreases or speeds up respectively. You do have the effect, which might be desirable, of a changing depth of field.

ISO ramping is another alternative, as well as a combination of all three (ISO, shutter speed and aperture). How you achieve these technically is left to your imagination.

This is by no means an exhaustive guide to time lapse photography with DSLRs. There is a lot of information out there which I have found useful and informative. I am simply at the early stages of exploring the state of the art and wanted to share this with others and perhaps point people in the right direction.

I’ve decided to share the product of 3 evening of work with my little bulb ramping intervalometer. There is so much left for me to learn about video post production and I am still learning from the many mistakes I make every time I go out. From the video it might be self evident that my tripod isn’t quite stable enough (btw – bridges shake quite a lot when lorries drive over them!), I’ve forgotten to set the white balance before a few of the shots, and there are a few missing frames which result in the test pattern you see. I am otherwise happy with what is at this stage just a proof of concept bulb ramping time lapse.

In many ways shooting time lapse photography is much like the old days of photography with film. You only fully learn what mistakes you have made long after you have taken a picture. Your ability to make adjustments on the go is rather limited and experimenting takes a lot of time.

If you are looking to embark on a similar journey, be prepared to wake up early, go to bed late and spend a great deal of time doing this. Shooting a single sequence can end up taking hours, and then post production is laborious and a subject in it’s own right.

I am currently living in Johannesburg, South Africa and being in some of these locations with a bunch of gear after dark makes me a little nervous too. Last week I had the police pay me a visit while I was on a bridge over looking Park Station. They were concern about my safety and asked me why I hadn’t brought along friends.

One last point I’ll make about the Arduino: when i started writing this post I thought I would have more to say about the Arduino. I am new to it, but i believe it is an affordable platform  that is easy to get into and the end which can be achieved are limited only by your imagination. There is also lot of inspiration out there: The Arduino is the processor behind the dynamic perception stage zero dolly, I’ve seen a number of motorized panohead that use the Arduino, and I’ve seen some really interesting quadcopters and other assorted drone mounted cameras controlled by arduino setups (Think low cost aerial photography and the ultimate infinity boom!). I’ve only been citing photography/time lapse/videography example because I have a particular interest in them, but the list goes on and on.

I’ve managed to find a well priced South African supplier of an Arduino variant called the Aarduino. Anton from Karasu has also been really helpful when I’ve needed a little guidance.

Other interesting stuff that I might write about or might interest you:

USB control of camera

Cheap intervalometer/remote timer

This is an old one that has never seen the light of day

This is an old favourite that has until now, never left my Aperture library. This picture was taken in June 2008 on a special little trip into the Pamir mountains. Along the road we passed this family trading stones and a few little trinkets.

This picture is in fact an HDR image although I’ve tried to process it in a way that it isn’t too obvious. I used my Russian MC Peleng 8mm fisheye lens. It is a little bit soft at the corners, but every once in a while this lens produces something special.

Back to the time and place this picture was taken. This is one of the most beautiful places I have ever been. I have a few other images from this little trip that I’m saving for a rainy day.

As regular readers of my blog will know, I’ve done a bit of  travelling in the past. At last count I think it is about 54 countries that I’ve visited. Someone asked me last night about where I still want to go. I couldn’t really name a place. I told her instead that I now would prefer to return to a few special places that I have been to before. This is one of those few special places.

I wont say anymore for now. I have some interesting plans for my return. I’ll wait for the time when new pictures do my plans justice. It might be 10 years before I follow up on this post….

Hiking out of Temple Basin

In an earlier post I mentioned that I believe the hike into Temple Basin is what keeps it special. I had an even more interesting hike out than the hike it. I left in the snow, which before long was rain, and there was quite a bit of ice on the track down. It is even enjoyable in bad weather.

Once again, I’m giving zoom.it from Microsoft a whirl. You can zoom in or pan across the image using the controls in the bottom right corner.

Mt Blimit line

This photo is one of my favourites from Temple Basin. There are so many elements in it. If you look at the horizon you can see the West coast of New Zealand and the Tasman Sea. You can also see a tent camp and a snow cave in the bowl below. You can also see the start of the bootpack we put in to hike to Mt Blimit to get these fresh tracks. And then in the foreground there is Scotty Heale putting in a turn just to illustrate what great snow we had up there!

You’re able to zoom into the picture below and pan across it if you want to look at the detail. Use the icons in the bottom right corner of the image.This is the first time I’m using “zoom.it” and I have to say that I quite like it! Expect to see me use it more often in my panoramas!