arduino, robots, cameras, and life

I have always wanted to do this kind of photography, but with most digital cameras there is simply no way you can leave the shutter open and the sensor on for a few hours. My D40 starts to get some serious noise after a few minutes, and there clearly must be an upper limit due to the sensor overheating. Luckily for me there is a relatively simple way to compose LOTS of shots into one image and achieve the same effect.
For those who only want to mile high review of it, here it is. Take a ton of pictures with a long-ish shutter speed. (for this one I used 10 seconds) and then layer them all in photoshop on top of each other and use the
“screen” blending mode to get them all visible.
The actual application of this can be difficult, because it is either REALLY time consuming, or it requires some thought and scripting. I decided to go for the latter and use my noggin a bit.

Scripting a photoshop action.
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This is one of those projects I’ve been working on for quite a while now, but never well enough to actually put it in a box! Well.. it still has no box, but it’s much closer to a boxable form.

It is a RBBB arduino clone (but any arduino
will
work) with an ir led, a potentiometer, a resistor, and some perfboard. The perfboard is as much there to help provide a little bit of wire strain relief as it is to provide a place to mount the pot. The code simply reads the pot input and converts it into a delay() function. Then it fires the IR led with the nikon-specific magic to tell my d40 to shoot.

Here is an example of one of the timelapses I have shot.

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I still haven’t gotten the grip I mentioned a few posts ago. I don’t know if I will. I have figured out a clumsy hack to get the job done and I might just run it this way, or perhaps clean it up a tiny bit.

This is the battery with little aluminum strips taped to it. The battery compartment is too tight for regular wires, so foil was the only way to do it.

aluminum foil wiring for battery pack d40

This pic shows the “wires” coming out of the battery grip. I have alligator clips on a 7.3V 200Ma cell phone charger. I connect it to the foil and off we go!

The reason why I have the battery in there is because without it, there isn’t enough juice to fully actuate the shutter. I think that some kind/type of capacitor would also do this, but I’m afraid I don’t what kind would work.

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I had a lot of time to kill over break, so I shot a bunch of timelapses. Here they are!

This is from a coffeeshop that I spent a lot of my time in.

This is of some clouds at dusk. This one has two separate positions, and it is really interesting to see the color shift towards the end of the video. I also have it on auto-something(ISO?), so it isn’t very consistent frame to frame.

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