brainwagon

Last year, I bodged together a motion detecting camera to photograph hummingbirds at my hummingbird feeder. But it was always a temporary hack. We had some difficulty with the ants that discovered the feeder, and we discontinued the experiment. I had a post that I could hang some feeders from, and decided to fill a […]

While I was dinking around with my binoculars during the eclipse last night, I decided to try to hunt for an application which would allow me to have better control over the exposures etc. on my iPhone. I found the program Manual, which gives SLR like controls (more on that some other time) but I […]

My goal in experimenting with the Raspberry Pi camera was to try to make an efficient and effective camera which can detect motion. Previous incarnations of the camera script merely looked at the differences in pixel values between adjacent frames, thresholded them at some value, and then counted the number of pixels which exceeded this […]

My previous experiments with a foam core 4×5 camera has whetted my appetite for more camera experiments. In particular, I was looking for cameras that could be built quickly, and where amateurs could construct their own lenses out of surplus optics. I am particularly interested in cameras that use the old fashioned meniscus landscape lens […]

My recent experiments with large format photography with primitive cameras has me googling and surfing around. In my rampant clicking, I uncovered this very simple camera, which is even simpler than the 4×5 cameras that our class constructed. It’s just a positive meniscus lens with a 120 mm focal length, stopped down to f/90, held […]

Here are two more photos I took at last night’s camera workshop. I wanted to take something slightly more beautiful than a selfie, so I chose the Luxo statue outside the Steve Jobs building at Pixar, and some white flowers from the garden. Both were taken rather late in the day, under partly cloudy skies […]

Over the years that I’ve been interested in computer graphics and telescopes, I’ve managed to pick up a bit of knowledge about optics in general, and specifically about camera lens design. In the past, I’ve been particularly interested in old cameras and photography, and in a kind of photographic minimalism. But it has remained mostly […]

Courtesy of a new $1.99 app called Word Foto, I give you:

I got home today, and decided to tack together a prototype picavet, mostly because I couldn’t visualize how it works. httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LEIbac-dULs In case you don’t know what a Picavet is, and it wasn’t clear from my somewhat rambling “demonstration” above, you can surf back to my posting about the Kite Aerial Photography Electronic Resources page, […]

I might have an opportunity in a couple of weeks to go do some kite flying at an upcoming picnic, and I thought that I might give a quick try at quick and dirty kite photography. After all, I’ve been musing about lofting a camera up high using a weather balloon, so why not start […]

Ralf Vandebergh has a really interesting web page, where he shows pictures of the ISS and Shuttle missions taken with a 10″ Newtonian telescope. The detail is really amazing. Images of ISS, Space Shuttle and other spaceflight objects by Ralf Vandebergh George Tarsoudis has similar equipment, and produces similarly impressive results: Images of Satellites by […]

I’m a huge fan of gadgets which have the possibility of open source third party updates. I have a couple of Linksys routers that I’ve reflashed with DDWRT and/or Tomato and/or OpenWRT. I’ve played with the NSLU2. I have a Canon SD1100 which I run CHDK. Today, I discovered another interesting one: Magic Lantern Firmware […]

I have a little Canon SD1100 that I picked up a while ago. One of its cool features is its ability to run the alternative CHDK firmware. It includes many interesting features, such as scripting, improved time lapse photography and such, but it also includes the ability to do really fast shutter speeds. I was […]

My morning browsing eventually sent me to Nick’s pinhole photography, which has many excellent scans of 19th and early 20th century articles on the subject of pinhole photography. Very neat stuff.

Check out the cool video of a pair of tufted titmouses who are building a nest in a birdhouse that has been equipped with a webcam.  Courtesy of the Make blog. [tags]Birdhouse,Webcam,Science Project[/tags]