Posts

Posted on

Do you Backup as you shoot?

I do, at least I am able to do when I’m shooting tethered with my CameraControl 4.1 script. Every image goes onto the flash memory card in the camera *and* onto the hard disk of the attached PC.

That matters to me when I’m doing a critical shoot. To me a critical shoot means one of my wife or my kids, capturing moments near to my heart which may never be exactly replicated. Particularly true with a 4 month old baby! It’s amazing how every week he is do different – so no going back and saying “I’ll take that picture again next week”, coz it won’t be the same will it?

Not that I have ever had a memory card fail in any of my DSLRs (D40 or D300), but I have had them fail either technically or due to operator error and lost shots I’m sad about. There is only one chance at a “first time” for something particularly with kids.

So if I shoot tethered, with a tiny Fujitsu Lifebook perhaps in a backpack if I’m moving about and a cable into the camera then I’m sure I have two copies of everything.

Of course I could get a D3 instead with two card slots which I believe allows shots to be written to both, but wouldn’t that be overkill?

Posted on

Hardware timelapse IR for Nikon

Check out Whiternoise over at Hexus.net who has this great post about building a hardware timelapse device using programable chips.  He has posted circuit diagrams and great shots of the plastic breadboard set-up.

Looks like a real fun project if you like that type of DIY – the electronics with wires and solder type – and if your Nikon DSLR is one with an IR receiver for a remote; e.g. works with a ML-3.

Posted on

DIYPhotobits.com Camera Control 4.1 – Dog Food

Changes in 4.1 – the “Eat your own dog food” release of DIYPhotobits.com Camera Control.

4.1

– allow fractional bracketing by changing Cint to Cdbl

– don’t crash on line 157 if there is nothing to download

– removed the “download immediately” function and changed things so that the normal tether does this function
– fixed the bug where push external viewer doesn’t work unless you explicitly choose the output folder

Download it here.

Posted on

Line: 157; char: 2; Error: Index out of range

Update: Sadly this doesn’t work. Ok I really need to fix this bug soon.

Getting this message from DIYPhotobits.com Camera Control when you click the “Shutter Release” button?

It’s a bug, the script is failing to handle the fact that the camera is very slightly slow in delivering the image after taking it.

To avoid this:

Stop using the “Download Immediately” checkbox

Instead, press the “Start Tether” button.

The result is (almost) the same; when you click Shutter Release the images ARE immediately downloaded (because the tether is running), but it’s by a different piece of code that patiently waits for the image to become available rather than demanding it immediately.

Side-effect; this means if you press the shutter release button on the camera then that image also is downloaded.

Sorry I haven’t posted a proper fix for this. What with a new baby in the house (3 months next week and doing fine) we hardly have time to get our jobs done, let alone our hobbies.

Posted on

Iphone Nikon remote control

I’m glad to see more and more things that make my Camera Control script obsolete! See this Iphone Nikon remote control application.

Now you can get full control of your Nikon (not just PTP things but full SDK control including liveview) via an iphone or itouch. It’s only $20 too so very reasonable – there is a “lite” version for $2 also.

Downside is that it isn’t really the iphone controlling the DSLR, actually the iPhone talks to software on your PC (via what they call “server” software) and the PC talks to the DSLR so you do need a PC (windows or apple) meaning this is not quite the lightweight solution it appears at first glance.

I have not actually tried this myself (I don’t have an iphone) but it sounds like a great idea.

[via Scott Kelby]

Posted on

DIY Seamless White background

Everybody wants to do this at least once right?  We’ll after a few false starts I finally got a result which is pretty usable.

DIY White Seamless background test
DIY White Seamless background test

Ok so the white shorts were a mistake but still the result pleased me given that it was just a white sheet and some boards painted white to stand on.  Two SB-600 at half power are about level with the model (me) pointing one a bit up and one a bit down to cover the area behind me until it is almost blow — RGB around ~250, and under foot is a large (8×4′) board painted with flat white paint.

Key light is from an SB-600 in a 2′ softbox at camera right 45 degrees in TTL EV+ something or other.  Giving me RGB of around 245 under foot.   So it needed some levels to totally wash out the floor (which also contributes to loosing the right side of the shorts).  Also a white brush to clean up bits of light stands (one bamboo, one in the edge of the frame.  But importantly no need to trace around the model or do masks, paths or any other kind of clipping!

Shot this all tethered of course as I really needed to see details with the eye dropper to see where I was up to.

Would never have got anywhere with this without reading Zack Arias’ guide , so many thanks to him.

Also by getting the lighting on the background sheet right I basically wash out all the wrinkles in the fabric so that was good, saved me some ironing.

Now I need to do this again with a better model and non-white clothing!  Next time I’ll take some setup shots as well.

Posted on

Photowalk is today

I’ll be going on the local city edition of the worldwide photowalk arranged by Scott Kelby today. Nothing DIY about it thought, well I’ll have a folding paper grid in my kit and a few other things like that, but mostly walking and meeting some new folk.

It will be the first time I’ve been out shooting for a while, at least since the baby was born (who is well now, thanks to those who commented).

Trying to get more sleep is a priority most days rather than spending time on photography!

Posted on

Free Mac Nikon Control Beta

Stefan Hafeneger , has built a Nikon specific camera control app for macs which is now beta and freely available.   He is using the Nikon SDK as well so should be able to implement much more Nikon specific controls than I am able to via WIA on Windows in my script.  

Apparently he is able to understand the SDK as well – which means not only can he program better than I but his English/Japanese parsing skill is much higher than mine as well and I salute him!

[via dptnt]

Proudly powered by WordPress