I checked, DontEverTryThis.com is available, and I considered reserving it for this hack, because you should never do this to a $2700 camera. I debated posting this, but I had already promised the DS shooter user’s group that I’d give it a try.

Bracket sequences don’t seem to work with live-view enabled.  I needed to find a way to lock the mirror through an entire shooting sequence. Upon studying the 5D’s mirror mechanism, I found that the mirror is spring loaded, and will not force it self back down after swinging up, if it is -somehow- held in place. Barring modifying the camera’s body, I found the easiest way to seize the mirror is by attaching a knob to the back of the lens. I don’t think this will work with smaller sensors, there is only a small “window of opportunity” that is not exposed on an APS sized body.

The gimmick is to attach half of a rubber bumper to the edge of the lens, so that a rule held to the top edge of the glass is tangent to the bumper. This will gently hold the mirror up out of the way, only if the mirror is moved up using the camera manual cleaning function before the lens is attached. Do this wrong, and the mirror will crash or the bumper will dislodge and the sticky residue on the back of it will naturally fall onto the sensor.

The cleaning function. Real high-quality image, Eddie?

So why on Earth would I do this? Image quality, plain and simple. (Empirical data to follow.) There is significantly less impact resonance inside the camera body when the mirror is not slammed to the top before every image, and thanks to the Gods of live-view, focusing through the viewfinder is moot in situations where I need to take several aligned exposures.

Mirror locked up by the manual cleaning function

The alternative is to wait longer after pressing the shutter in ML mode for the vibration to settle, then expose the image. In pictures like this bridge, a 1 second settling period would add 15 seconds to the exposure sequence, and at sunset & with wind and water, a lot can move in 15 seconds.

Multiple Exposureness

Some of the programs included:

I wish I had more time to use the astrophotgraphy module…. too…sleepy…

Included e-manuals as well:

5D mkII with 24-105 lens. There iiis nooo sanctuary.

Sigma SD-14 handheld 3-shot pano merged with ptgui

One of the reasons I carry the two cameras is that you run into a few nut-balls in the boonies. If I have to surrender a camera, it’s not going to have an L series lens on it. On this trip I was essentially in the middle of nowhere, but still came across a half dozen people, one who was there to drink beer and fire his potato cannon. He didn’t even “announce” when he was going to fire, there was no ceremony, he just mumbled something about “you’ll never bother me again” and fired away into a river bed.

The last stop was a gigapano of these rocks. I used the 5D Mk II and the Nintendo powered Celestron mount. The place has a serious Gorn infestation and is the remarkable work of the San Andreas fault. This is why the movie studios first came to Southern California, any environment from dry dry desert to snow flurries are within a few hours drive.

After a few thousand homes burned in The Valley’s constant battle with nature.

Grouse Mountain

Incorrectly mounted fossils at LAMNH

Unbracketed version

The islands of Los Angeles. Yes, they have islands.

This is (taken from) the bluff where the truck is lured off a cliff in Spielberg’s Duel

The first image from a Nikon D100 connected to a Nintendo DS for bracketing (of whatever happened to be next to this desk.) Good news: Exif data seems to be correct, unlike Canon’s rounding off to the nearest second. Bad news: unlike the Canon’s… on this camera at least, the controlled shot time will not go below 1/4 second. It will always take a 1/4 second shot any time a shorter shot is requested.

The non-bracketed image:

I captured about 30GB worth of time-lapsed images using the Nintendo DS and Canon DSLR over a week in Vancouver (only because the DS made it so easy). Much of it was bracketed sunrises and sunsets, but I’m not sure yet how to process those efficiently. Here is a quickie non-hdr taken at 30 - sec intervals. I can’t help but hear the King of The Hill theme when I see these played.

Vancouver Nintendo DS controller time lapse Canon 50D from Chopperman on Vimeo.

Switching these over to Vimeo because YouTube apparently stinks. But I gather that you need to play the Vimeo videos twice before they play at the correct frame rate.

Ships on a windy day from Chopperman on Vimeo.

On the building, middle-left, someone actually rappels down the side of the tower.

She’s working more/less, but finding an elegant way to enter the time zone is a problem. Right now, the program tries to guess the time zone based on your location, but it’s hard to be certain in areas around time zone borders, and some countries in Asia are all over the place. The top screen is used for debug info until it is reworked to a nicer display.

Alex Lindsay of This Week in Photography called the DS camera controller “Awesome, Awesome, Awesome.” You know what? It is kinda fun. I did some field testing today to work out any kinks. One of them was readability at high-noon. It looks like all of the letters in the interface will have to be changed, black-on-grey was unreadable while white worked fine.

This panoramic was cropped from nine frames, each generated from nine individual bracket shots under DS control. The timing issues have been resolved by rewriting the timing-loop algorithm to not rely on the system clock. The image was taken towards back-lit direct sunlight, but the HDR bracketing made it work. The brackets were compiled to HDR in Photomatix Pro, then stitched in PtGui, and finally cleaned up (5D sensor dust) in Photoshop CS4. It’s good to be a beta tester…CS4 breezed through processing the 100 megapixel result.

I did the quarter-mile hike in carrying only the camera and tripod, DS in my back pocket. I loved not having to carry a laptop to tether, especially since it was hovering around 100 degrees, and I had to climb down & up a 70 foot hill in a hot Santa Ana that seemed to want to move every branch and blade of grass in the frame. This seems a tranquil enough setting, if not a bit dry. That’s ironic because the spot I placed the tripod was once sixty feet under water. What looks like rock at the right is actually a concrete mound, the site is actually “ground zero” of the worst man-made disaster in California history, the collapse of the Saint Francis dam that killed over 450 people as the six story wall of water made it’s way to the ocean fifty miles downstream, erasing entire towns in its path. The landslide that is believed to have triggered the collapse can be seen on the hillside at left.

Someone asked what the “California Cheese” image in a previous post would look like without Nintendo bracketing, here’s what the picture shows when the exposure is set for the foreground:

I just finished this mega-pano controller, a fire-and forget solution that involved physically modifying a Celestron telescope mount to move the camera’s nodal point over the rotational axes, then mounting everything that would normally be cabled to an internal wireless usb hub. Besides the serial-to-usb connector needed to direct the mount and the usb to run the camera, there’s also an added gps and a XGA webcam that mounts to the camera’s viewfinder in order to add a “liveview” function. In order to get the range needed to get very far from the device, the Belkin wireless usb hub was gutted and its antennas were replaced with ones scavanged from a wi-fi router. The whole thing runs off of internal battery power. I do not want to lug this up a mountain.

Ahh, that Cybil Shepard glow. I used a rapid prototyping machine to cover up the nasty gap between where the mount arm used to meet the base and where I had to move it to center the camera. I did this mainly so the airport security dudes wouldn’t think it was an entirely jury-rigged device (hmmm…we’ve got a gps transponder here, Jim.) It lends it a nice finished look and served as the perfect place to mount an antenna. The whole shindig can be set up to run any variety of captures autonomously, run by a program based on the Canon SDK.