Andrew Hazelden's Blog

Today I just completed with my brother, Russell, our most adventurous and complex aerial video from our Multiplex Easy Star model airplane. The video is called “An Aerial Exploration of West Dover” and it is a ride high above West Dover, Nova Scotia. It was filmed in 720p High Definition video.

The airplane was controlled by a 72 MHz Hitec Optic 6 R/C radio and flown using a 900 MHz video link which provided a FPV ( First Person View ). This video was recorded on August 18, 2010 in 720p HD with a Canon Powershot SD780IS Camera with CHDK.

The music used in the video was “Un instant per sempre” and “Our Moon” composed by Roger Subirana Mata.

If you are on High Speed Internet make sure to enable the 720p resolution video option on the lower right of the video controls so you will be able to see all sorts of fine detail.

West Dover Harbour

Privateer's Island

The View of Privateer's Island Looking Towards Mackerel Cove

Power's Lake, West Dover

This is a Phantogram of a Canon Powershot SD400 camera. Red / Cyan 3D glasses are required to view this stereoscopic image.  I think that this is my best Phantogram to date, and I am really happy with it. I processed the images in Apple Shake. I have now decided to show a preview of the printed Phantograms so people can see what they look like before they print them.

Canon SD400 Phantogram Anaglyph Preview

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This is a slit-scan video experiment I created. Wildflowers were filmed rotating around on a lazy susan. The footage was then processed on my Mac using a custom SDL based program written in C-code. This technique is also known as Chronotopic Anamorphosis or Digital Peripheral Streak Photography. I previously tried this technique on Autodesk Maya rendered footage.

SDL based Slit-Scan program

Recently I had the need to digitize a few banker boxes worth of old documents. I usually would use a Canon Lide scanner to scan a few pages but this project required the capture of a few thousand pages of paper and would take forever with a normal document scanner. After looking around on the internet to see what other people have done to solve this type of problem I decided to build my own document imager.

I converted an old overhead projector into a stand by taking off the projector head and adapted the arm and bracket to have a 1/4 inch camera thread mount. Then I spray painted a plywood board matte black for the imager table surface. Two old desk lamps were mounted next to the table for illumination. I hooked a Canon Powershot camera to a TV for previewing the document imager output using the camera’s NTSC video output. To enable constant focus and brightness during a capture session I used AEL (Auto Exposure Lock) and AFL (Auto Focus Lock) modes. The digital camera was powered off a wall power adapter using a Canon ACK-DC10 AC Adapter Kit.

I have been extremely happy with the results and it takes a fraction of the time a normal scanner would take to capture a few hundred pages at a time.

Document Imager

CHDK supports shutter speed overrides that will give you more precise control over the exposure of your image. It can be a little confusing when you first use the settings found in the Extra Photo Operations Menu. Besides controlling shutter speed there are also controls for bracketing in the Extra Photo Operations Menu. Some but not all Canon Point & Shoot cameras also support aperture overrides. The Canon Powershot SD780IS for example lacks an aperture. That is why depending on the camera you have you might not be able to find the override aperture menu item mentioned in the CHDK All Best users guide.

With time and experience the Extra Photo Operations Menu can become easier to understand and control.

Check out this CHDK Wiki article for a detailed explanation of shutter overrides.
http://chdk.wikia.com/wiki/CHDK_User_Manual#Extra_Photo_Operations

I must admit I find the wording for the options in the Extra Photo operations menu a bit confusing for me. I come from a DSLR background so I will try my best to explain how to get the controls to work.

Open the Extra Photo operations menu.

Change the Disable overrides from “disable” to “off” to engage the custom shutter speed overrides.

Change the Shutterspeed enum type to Factor. This allows the table below to be used for override values. For an exposure of 1/250th of a second set the override shutter speed to 4 and the value factor to 1/1000.

The shutter speed is calculated in the camera with CHDK as:
(override shutter speed) * (value factor) = real shutter speed
4 * 1/1000 = 0.004  (1/250th of a second) (more…)

Canon SD780IS Viewfinder Mod

Here is a quick hack I put together for  the Canon Powershot SD780IS / IXUS 100 IS. You take a 3x specimen viewer / bug magnifier / loupe with a 6 cm wide square base that fits over the camera’s lcd screen. (more…)